Palma, Las Palmas, La Palma...

If you’ve ever been in the Canary Islands, you surely know that there is some confusion about the names of the place: La Palma, Las Palmas, Palma… Even the Spaniards get confused with that, there are even people saying that people got on a place flying to La Palma thinking they were going to Las Palmas (I think it’s an urban legend.)

The places

Now you will understand why it’s so complicated.

Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: the capital city of the island of Gran Canaria. It is also the capital city of the Province of Las Palmas.

Las Palmas (without “de Gran Canaria”): the name of the eastern province of the Canary Islands, made up of Lanzatore, Fuerteventura and Gran Canaria.

La Palma: another island of the Canary archipelago.

Palma (de Mallorca): the main city of the Balearic islands (quite far away from the Canary islands).

Santa Cruz de Tenerife: capital of Tenerife. It is also name of the western province of the Canary Islands, made up of El Hierro, La Gomera, La Palma and Tenerife.

Santa Cruz de La Palma: capital of La Palma.

The map

Better use the FullScreen button…

Hopefully the map makes all this more explicit. Basically we represent the different entities (cities, provinces, islands) using geoJSON files. The plugin groupedlayercontrol is nice to have different categories (cities, provinces, …) in the layer menu.