Valverde, Canary Islands, Spain

Valverde, Canary Islands, Spain: Submarine Cable Landing Point

Valverde is a settlement on El Hierro, the westernmost of the Canary Islands, an autonomous Spanish archipelago situated in the Atlantic Ocean off the northwest coast of Africa. As a submarine cable landing point, Valverde connects El Hierro to the broader Spanish inter-island cable network. One submarine cable currently lands here, linking El Hierro to the neighbouring island of La Gomera within the Canary Islands group.

The connectivity established at Valverde is intra-archipelago in nature, providing a direct submarine link between two of the smaller Canary Islands. This inter-island corridor reflects the role that short-haul submarine cables play in ensuring that remote island communities within Spain remain connected to the wider national network.

Cables Landing at Valverde, Canary Islands, Spain

La Gomera-El Hierro (draft) is the sole submarine cable landing at Valverde. As its name indicates, the cable runs between El Hierro and La Gomera, both part of the Canary Islands, Spain. The cable is currently listed in draft status, meaning it is at a planning or pre-deployment stage. No length, ready-for-service year, or capacity specifications have been confirmed for this cable at this time. Its endpoints are entirely within Spanish territory, making it a domestic inter-island cable.

Regional Context

Within Spain's submarine cable landscape - which spans 34 cables across 46 landing points - Valverde sits at the lower end of the scale by cable count, hosting a single cable compared to peers such as Alta Vista in the Canary Islands, Barcelona, Bilbao, Granadilla de Abona, Santa Cruz de La Palma, and Valencia, each of which serves three cables. Among the Canary Islands landing points specifically, Valverde's role is more modest than that of Alta Vista, Granadilla de Abona, or Santa Cruz de La Palma, which each support a greater number of connections. Valverde nonetheless represents an important node for El Hierro's submarine connectivity within the archipelago.

Network Role

Valverde functions as a single-cable terminus rather than a multi-cable hub, serving El Hierro's direct submarine link to La Gomera. The La Gomera-El Hierro cable, once operational, provides an inter-island connection that integrates El Hierro into the Canary Islands submarine cable network at the domestic level. No intercontinental or transatlantic routes are associated with this landing point based on the cable landing here.

In the broader Spanish submarine cable graph, Valverde represents the kind of short-haul, intra-national connection that extends network reach to smaller, more remote island communities, complementing the longer-distance international cables that terminate at Spain's larger landing points.