The statue of Cirilo López Umpiérrez in Morro Jable

The statue of Cirilo López Umpiérrez is located at the beginning of the pedestrian street La Piragua, in the historic center of Morro Jable.
The small square bears the same name as the bronze statue.
The statue of Cirilo López Umpiérrez was inaugurated in 2005 and is the work of Majorero artist Juan Miguel Cubas.
But why was Cirilo López Umpiérrez so important for Fuerteventura and, above all for Morro Jable, so much so that a statue and a square were dedicated to him in the center of the town?

Cirilo López Umpiérrez lived in Fuerteventura between the end of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th, becoming one of the historical figures of the island.
In 1899, in one of the most remote and uninhabited areas of Fuerteventura, he built his house, or rather a fishing hut, near the beach overlooking what is now Morro Jable.
Cirilo López Umpiérrez is considered the first person to live permanently in what is now the city of Morro Jable.
He transformed what was a place of passage into an ideal place for long-term stays.

Like the good fisherman that he was, Cirilo traveled the island from one port to another, making the journey from Jandía to Tostón. In 1928, he also obtained a house named after him in Puertito de Los Molinos, in the municipality of Puerto del Rosario.

Despite this, Cirilo López Umpiérrez chose Morro Jable as his main home, exactly where his statue and the square dedicated to him are today

Cover image by: Frank Vincentz, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons