The home of the poet of the ocean in Gran Canaria
The Tomás Morales House Museum in Moya is a showcase of the profoundness of cultura in Gran Canaria.
There once was a poet who instead of dipping his feather in ink, he dipped it directly into the sea water. He was called Tomás Morales, and was born in Moya in 1884 and is considered one of the leading lights in modernism in Spain. His poems contain traces of foam and salt, because, as he said himself, they come from the infinite Atlantic.
The Tomás Morales House Museum in Moya occupies the very home the writer was born in, right in the centre of a town that also looks like it came from a poem. In fact, its lush valleys were reflected in Morales’ poetry, which built up a very particular picture of Gran Canaria, based on word and rhyme.
The museum allows visitors to peek into the privacy of the poet and really feel they are in his place. Almost literally indeed, because one of the rooms is a reconstruction of his office, with orignal furniture and other objects that bring the place and time he was writing some of his most accomplished poetic works to be done in Canaries right up to the present day.
Here stand his desk, chair, letter opener and lamp that lit up the moments of inspiration of a man who felt that his blood was being cleansed every time his steps took him down to the sea, as reflected in his ‘Ode to the Atlantic’, a paradigmatic example of his literary legacy.
The museum is an authentic house of poetry, a veritable store of books, documents and all kinds of materials related both to Morales himself and the modernist genre in general. Here the last word always rounds off a verse.
A day out in Moya is completed by the sweet taste of Moya spongecakes, that follow in the tradition of the pioneering women who produced the original recipe, by baking them with branches and firewood from eucalyptus trees. At one end of town, hanging over a cliff edge and therefore under two skies, rises the Church of Our Lady of La Candelaria, whose ever punctual clanging of bells reminds us that it is now time to wrap up this story and open a book by Tomás Morales.
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