Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

 
 
 
The city was founded on June 24th 1478, with the name "Real de Las Palmas". In 1492, Christopher Columbus anchored in the Port of Las Palmas on his first trip to the Americas. The Casa Colon museum is named after him. The raid and partial destruction of Las Palmas by the Dutch under Vice Admiral Pieter van der Does in 1599 is considered a major event in the city's history.
In July 1936 General Francisco Franco launched a coup from Las Palmas that eventually turned into the Spanish Civil War.
Throughout history, Las Palmas received waves of immigrants from mainland Spain and countries from every continent. The majority of the population is Spanish, although there are large North and Sub-Sahara African and Latin American communities, as well as important historical minorities such as Indians (Sindhi) and Koreans and a growing population of Chinese. Ethnically, most Canarians are descendants of a mixture of Guanches (aboriginal people of the Canary Islands now extinct) and the Spanish colonizers and European (Portuguese, Italian, Irish, Flemish, German) conquistadors.