“Life’s wonderful here,” he said, and raised the rent while he was at it

There is no phrase a Canary Islander hears more, nor one that stirs more mixed feelings, than “how lucky, life’s so good there.” The visitor lets it out, enchanted, while gazing at the sunset. And one smiles, nods, and inside thinks: yes, life’s wonderful, until the first of the month arrives.

Because paradise, it turns out, also sends a bill, and an expensive one. The sun is free, true, and the sea charges no entry, for now. But everything else —the rent, the weekly shop, the ticket to leave the island when one wants to see something other than the same beautiful horizon— comes with a surcharge no one mentions on the postcards.

We live in the prettiest shop window in the world, yes, but it is a shop window where it is ever harder to find room to live. One watches one’s lifelong neighbourhood fill up with wheeled suitcases and wonders, without rancour but with a certain melancholy, where the people who make this place work will live.

And still we don’t leave. Of course we don’t leave. Because one looks out at that sunset, breathes that air, dips one’s feet in that January sea, and understands that, complaints and all, belt-tightening and all, this is still the best place in the world to be poor in money but rich in everything else. And with that, islanders, we carry on.