AGATHA CHRISTIE IN THE CANARY ISLANDS, JANUARY-APRIL 1927
by Derek Winterbottom

The author read a first degree in history at the University of Oxford and a master’s degree in medieval studies at the University of York and he has published about 30 books and booklets in the fields of history, biography, local history and education. These include ‘Tenerife, An English History’, a short history of the island published in 2010 and available on Kindle. This article is based on the text of a talk he gave to an audience of about 60 people in the English Library, Puerto de la Cruz, Tenerife, on 16 January, 2025. He has also given talks on the Isle of Man about Agatha Christie’s visit there in 1930 and written about the career of her first husband, Archie Christie.

By the summer of 1926 Agatha Christie had been married since 1914 to a decorated war hero, Colonel Archie Christie, CMG, DSO, and they had a daughter, Rosalind, born in 1919. Then, one day in August Archie confessed that he had fallen in love with Nancy Neele, a woman ten years his junior, and he asked for a divorce. Agatha was already dealing with the trauma of the death in April of her widowed mother and the need to take responsibility for the family home, a large Victorian villa in Torquay. She loved Archie and was very distressed by his news but hoped that he would change his mind. But they had many rows and after one of these on December 3 1926 Agatha ‘disappeared’ for eleven days without telling anyone where she might be.

By this time, though only 36, Agatha had written seven mystery novels as well as a considerable number of short stories. So she was well-enough known for her absence to be widely reported in the newspapers and become a national sensation, especially as her husband was a handsome and high-profile establishment figure who had undertaken a ten-month world tour in 1922 to promote the British Empire Exhibition held at Wembley in 1924. A huge search was set up, involving hundreds of police and many volunteers. Meanwhile conspiracy theorists whispered that this mistress of murder had actually been done away with by her husband. In the end Agatha was found staying quietly on her own at a hotel in Harrogate, though she gave the impression of being very vague and uncertain as to who she was. What actually happened remains the only unsolved Agatha Christie mystery.

She was taken to Abney Hall, the country house of her elder sister in Cheshire and there she steadily recuperated and her doctor advised her to take a complete break from England and family worries. It is well known that during the winter months the Canary Islands have an enviable warm and sunny climate and on the world tour in 1922, when she accompanied Archie, Agatha had seen the volcanic peak of Tenerife’s El Teide from a Union Castle ship that was taking them to South Africa. So she decided to sail to the Canaries and to take her seven-year-old daughter Rosalind with her, together with Charlotte Fischer, who had been both her companion and secretary and a nanny to Rosalind (who called her ‘Carlo’) for several years.

Recent research in the National Maritime Archives has shown that Agatha decided to travel in style and accordingly booked a luxury suite aboard the liner ‘Gelria’ which was destined for Buenos Aires, with a stop at Las Palmas in Gran Canaria.1 This impressive two-funnelled ship belonged to the Dutch ‘Royal Holland Lloyd’ line and had been built in 1913 in Glasgow to a very luxurious specification which earned her the title of ‘ship of the year’ from Britain’s ‘Shipping Illustrated’. She carried about 1,440 passengers, 235 in first class, 224 in second, 135 in third and 900 in steerage, with 300 crew. Starting in Amsterdam her itinerary was Southampton, Cherbourg, Vigo, Lisbon, Las Palmas, Pernambuco, Bahia, Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, and return. A historian of the line has written:

There was no doubt at all that the ‘Gelria’ was in her day an extremely luxurious ship….Her public venues were simply spectacular, a lounge decorated in an empire style…with a raised gallery for an orchestra playing: there was also a luxurious smoking room [and].. something that was generally unheard of in those days, a telephone in all first class super comfortable cabins.

‘Gelria’ was laid up in Amsterdam in 1916 after one of the company’s ships was sunk by a German submarine during the war but in 1919 she resumed her pre-war run to South America, as well as offering cruises in the Mediterranean and to Madeira.

Agatha and her party embarked on the ‘Gelria’ at Southampton on 23 January 1927 and presumably enjoyed all the comforts of the ship as well as seeing something of Cherbourg, Vigo and Lisbon before arriving at Las Palmas. Agatha was not a good sailor and had endured misery on her sea voyages on the Empire tour so we must hope that the crossing of the Bay of Biscay was smooth. Assuming that it is a four-day sea journey from Southampton to Las Palmas and adding extra time for three stops it is likely that Agatha arrived in Las Palmas around January 30.

At this point we are not able to plot her itinerary with certainty except to say that the Maritime Archives show that she left Las Palmas bound for Liverpool in the second half of April 1927 and arrived there on April 24 after a round trip of 93 days, at least 80 of which were spent in the Canaries.3 For further details we have to turn to her autobiography which, though arguably the best book she ever wrote, is not always explicit and can be inaccurate. She did, after all, write much of it from memory decades later. She makes no mention of the voyage on the Gelria and does not explain that it docked at Las Palmas, or exactly when she decided to cross over to Tenerife. Perhaps she stayed in Las Palmas for some time, which might have been the sensible thing to do with a seven-year old child and after a lengthy sea journey.

At some point she did decide to cross to Tenerife with Rosalind and Charlotte and to do this in 1927 they would have taken the ferry boat from Las Palmas to Santa Cruz de Tenerife, then a six-hour journey. Depending on the time of arrival in Tenerife they would either have stayed the night in Santa Cruz or set out the same day by taxi along what was then a mountainous and winding road to Puerto de la Cruz. In her autobiography Agatha calls her destination ‘Orotava’ and does not mention the name of the hotel at which she stayed but from her description it must be the Gran Hotel Taoro which was opened in 1882 as a luxury hotel for foreign visitors, chiefly British, and it was responsible for the growth of Puerto as the main tourist destination on Tenerife. This is what she wrote:

Orotava was lovely. The big mountain towered up; there were glorious flowers in the hotel grounds – but two things about it were wrong. After a lovely early morning, mists and fog came down from the mountain at noon, and the rest of the day was grey. Sometimes it even rained. And the bathing, to keen bathers, was terrible. You lay on a sloping volcanic beach on your face and you dug your fingers in and let waves come up and over you. But you had to be careful they did not cover you too much. Masses of people had been drowned there. It was impossible to get into the sea and swim; that could only be done by one or two of the very strongest swimmers, and even one of those had been drowned the year before. So after a week we changed, and moved to Las Palmas in Gran Canaria.4

Anyone familiar with Puerto knows that February is the worst month for weather and if you stay for only a week you may well have sunny mornings and cloudy afternoons, and that it does sometimes rain. Agatha enjoyed sea bathing and had acquired considerable skill as a surfer when she was in Honolulu on her Empire tour. She was therefore disappointed with the beaches in Puerto, possibly because the sand was black, and certainly because the Atlantic swell made bathing in the sea dangerous, whether from the Martianez beach or the quite rocky smaller beach near the port. Her assertion that ‘masses of people had been drowned there’, however, sounds like an exaggeration, even though it seems that Paul Macartney of the Beatles, while staying in Puerto in 1963 seemingly came close to drowning on Playa Martianez. 5 So, if her memory served her correctly, Agatha only spent a week in Puerto before deciding to go back to Las Palmas. We can only take her word for it because unfortunately the visitors books of the Taoro and any other hotels she might have stayed in while in the Canaries have not survived.

However, it is clear that Agatha explored the locality round the Taoro enough to walk as far as the small but elegant Villa La Paz, the home of the Cologon family. Whether she called upon the residents we do not know, but she describes the house and its location very clearly in a short story she probably wrote after getting back to England, called ‘The Man from the Sea’. The main character, Mr Satterthwaite, is on holiday on an island and he goes for a walk one day:

….past the palm trees and the straggling white houses, past the black lava beach where the surf thunders and where, once, long ago, a well-known English swimmer had been carried out to sea and drowned, past the rock pools where children and elderly ladies bobbed up and down and called it bathing, along the steep road that winds upwards to the top of the cliff. For there, on the edge of the cliff, was a house, appropriately named La Paz. A white house, with faded green shutters tightly closed, a tangled beautiful garden, and a walk between cypress trees that led to a plateau on the edge of the cliff where you looked down-down-down to the blue sea below. 6

Unless Agatha was cheating and using photographs or other people’s descriptions, it is pretty clear from this that she herself made that walk one day from the Taoro to the Villa La Paz and that the dramatic fall of the cliffs there gave her the idea for a story of romance and suicide involving a man called Harley Quin who turns up unexpectedly and influences events. She wrote a number of other stories featuring him and included this one in a volume of short stories published in 1930 and entitled ‘The Mysterious Mr Quin’. It is also possible that she called at another old house, Sitio Litre, well-known for its fine garden and hospitable British owners, Mr and Mrs Udall-Smith. They had a young daughter called Mollie and according to John Lucas, who eventually bought the house from her many years later, she was told by her parents that Agatha had visited the garden of the house. Agatha was a committed Christian and if she had been on the island on a Sunday she might well have decided to worship at All Saints, the Anglican church, only a very short walk away from her hotel, in the Parque Taoro. She might even have visited the nearby English Library, but we don’t know as much of the Library’s documentary archive has been lost.

What we do know is that she definitely came to Puerto and stayed in a hotel which she never names but must have been the Taoro, and that because of the poor bathing she moved back to Gran Canaria, if she remembered correctly, after a week. And we know that it is very likely that she walked up to the Villa la Paz, a walk now commemorated with the titles of her books written on the steps, a bust of her at the Mirador la Paz and the ‘walk between cypress trees’ now called the Paseo Agatha Christie.

When she was on Gran Canaria Agatha stayed in Las Palmas and this is what she wrote about it in her autobiography:

Las Palmas is still my ideal of the place to go in the winter months. I believe nowadays it is a tourist resort and has lost its early charm. Then, it was quiet and peaceful. Very few people came there except those who stayed for a month or two in winter and preferred it to Madeira. It had two perfect beaches. The temperature was perfect too; the average was about 70 [degrees Fahrenheit], which is, to my mind, what a summer temperature should be. It had a nice breeze most of the day and it was warm enough in the evenings to sit out of doors in the evening.7

She does not name the hotel at which she stayed, but it was almost certainly the Metropol. The two main hotels in Las Palmas at that time were the Santa Catalina and the Metropol, which both opened on Calle Leon y Castillo in the British quarter of the town, opposite the port and close to the British Club and the Tennis Club. The famous golden sand of the beach at Las Canteras was some distance away on the other side of town, but with her love of the surf Agatha would certainly have gone there. Both the Hotel Santa Catalina and the British Club claim today that she was among their distinguished visitors and she may well have gone there to dine or even to stay. Without visitors records we do not know. The Metropol itself, a Victorian-colonial building, was demolished in the 1970s and replaced by a large modern office block that is today the Ayuntamiento (central municipal offices) of Las Palmas.

After Rosalind had been put to bed at the hotel, Agatha would spend the evenings chatting with Carlo and they met fellow-guests Dr Lucas, a tuberculosis specialist, and his older sister Mrs Meek. They became close friends and when Agatha developed an ulcerated throat he looked after her and said ‘You are very unhappy about something, aren’t you? What is it, husband trouble?8

Another of Agatha’s short stories gives us some insight into her activities on Gran Canaria. The story is called ‘The Companion’ and the main character is a Dr Lloyd, who was probably based on her friend Dr Lucas. He narrates the story and begins:

The incident I am describing happens in the island of Gran Canaria, not Tenerife. It is a good many years ago now. I had a breakdown in health and was forced to give up my practice in England to go abroad. I practiced in Las Palmas, which is the principal town of Gran Canaria. In many ways I enjoyed life out there very much. The climate was mild and sunny, there was excellent surf bathing (I am an enthusiastic bather) and the sea life of the port attracted me. Ships from all over the world put in at Las Palmas. Sometimes they stay for a few hours, sometimes a day or two. In the principal hotel there, the Metropol, you will see people of all races and nationalities – birds of passage. Even the people going to Tenerife usually come here and stay a few days before crossing to the other island.9

This reference to the Metropol is the main evidence for the assumption that Agatha stayed there also.

In the story Dr Lloyd says that in this hotel one night he noticed two fellow-guests, Miss Mary Barton and her companion Miss Amy Durrant. The following day he motored with friends to the village of Agaete, where there is a fine beach called Las Nieves, and he finds that the two English women were also there and had gone bathing. Suddenly, there is a commotion, and despite the attempts of Mary Barton to save her, Amy Durrant drowns. The rest of the story proceeds with the usual Christie twists and turns and it was published in a volume of short stories entitled ‘Thirteen Problems’ in 1932. The fact that Agatha seems to know about the beach at Las Nieves suggests that she, too, motored there at some time.

Though Agatha eventually published these two short stories about the Canaries, her main work while on the islands was her murder novel ‘The Mystery of the Blue Train’. She had been advised to leave off work altogether but she found this impossible and worked on the new novel, though with difficulty. For one thing, Rosalind kept interrupting her, so that:

“I felt more strongly than ever that everything I was saying was idiotic….I faltered, I stammered, hesitated and repeated myself. Really, how that wretched book came to be written I don’t know!”10

It tells the story of Katherine Grey, an unhappy young woman whose husband has cheated on her and to escape it all she is travelling alone on the ‘Blue Train’ from Paris to the French Riviera. On the train she meets fellow-traveller Hercule Poirot who is soon faced with the murder of another fellow-traveller, which of course he eventually solves. The similarities between Katherine’s situation and that of Agatha herself are all too obvious and that may be one of the reasons she claimed it was her least favourite book. She says that she wrote ‘the best part’ of it in the Canaries and it was published in 1928 and sold just as well as most of her other books, which was important because at this stage in her life she really needed the money they earned.11

By the middle of April Agatha felt it was time to go home and a passage was booked for her party on the SS ‘Ascanius’, a vessel of the Blue Funnel Line which was on its way to Liverpool from Australia via South Africa. This was basically a cargo ship that took passengers and it was distinctly less glamorous than the ‘Gelria’. Built in Belfast in 1910 it had one funnel, and was 493 feet long with a gross tonnage of 10,042 and a limited capacity for passengers.12 In her autobiography Agatha reveals that her memory could play tricks because she writes: ‘Only one incident of note happened as we left Las Palmas for England. We arrived in Puerto de la Cruz to catch the Union Castle boat and the discovery was made that Blue Teddy had been left behind.’13 An obliging taxi man raced back to the hotel to collect Rosalind’s beloved toy and got back before the boat sailed, so all was well. But, of course, the ‘Ascanius’ sailed from Puerto de la Luz in Las Palmas, not Puerto de la Cruz in Tenerife and it was not a Union Castle vessel. The important thing, however, is that it landed Agatha, Rosalind and Carlo safely at Liverpool on 24 April, having missed the worst of the British winter.

Agatha’s friend Dr Lucas in Las Palmas had told her that if Archie did not change his mind about wanting a divorce, she should accept it and move on. On her return to England she had several meetings with Archie in which it became quite clear that a divorce was what he wanted, so they made all the necessary arrangements, which included a staged episode where Archie was observed by a witness to have spent the night with Nancy, which gave Agatha legal grounds for a divorce. The decree nisi came through in April 1928 and Archie and Nancy got married in October. Agatha decided to strike out alone on a big adventure and travelled later that year on the famous Orient Express train to Istanbul and then, far less comfortably, to Baghdad, where she met Leonard and Katharine Woolley, two archaeologists immersed in the world of ancient Mesopotamia. Through them she eventually met their assistant Max Mallowan, fourteen years younger than Agatha, who nevertheless proposed marriage after a few months. They were married in Edinburgh in September 1930 and the second main phase of Agatha’s life began. By the time she died at the age of 85 in 1975 she had written 73 novels, 166 short stories (collected in 28 books) and 16 stage plays and today, with estimated sales of well over two billion books, she is by a very long way the world’s best-selling novelist.14

In 2007, when he was vice-president of the Puerto tourist authority, John Lucas, the owner of the historic Sitio Litre in Puerto de la Cruz, was instrumental in founding the first Agatha Christie International Festival, a week-long event which is held in Puerto every two years and has attracted many Christie enthusiasts and experts, including Rosalind’s son, Mathew Prichard. It is the only major Christie festival apart from the one held in Torquay and celebrates the fact that Agatha visited the Canaries for nearly three months, wrote a short story each about Tenerife and Gran Canaria, and wrote most of a major novel while in the islands. No doubt following the lead of Puerto, in 2021 the city authorities in Las Palmas celebrated the 45th anniversary of Agatha’s death by naming an area close to the new La Cicer footbridge ‘Plaza Agatha Christie’, while a plaque commemorating her visit graces the walls of the Ayuntamiento, on the site of the former Metropol Hotel.

Copyright: Derek Winterbottom, July 2025.

Information from this article may be quoted as long as reference is made to the author, the title of the article, its date and the website of the English Library, Puerto de la Cruz, Tenerife, Canary Islands.

References

1 The National Archives, Kew. Passenger Lists Leaving UK by sea 1890-1960.
2 See ‘SS Gelria’, Royal Holland Lloyd, under ssmaritime.com online for a full description and many fascinating photographs.
3 This figure allows for the dates of travel from Southampton to Las Palmas in January and from Las Palmas to Liverpool in April plus estimated time for ports of call on the way.
4 Agatha Christie, An Autobiography, HarperCollins 1993 p369
5 ‘Canarian Weekly’, 17.04.23 online.
6 Quoted from ‘The Man from the Sea’, number six in a collection of short stories entitled ‘The Mysterious Mr Quin’, first published by Collins in April 1930.
7 Christie, Autobiography, p 369
8 Ibid, p370
9 Quoted from ‘The Companion’, number 8 in a collection of short stories entitled Thirteen Problems, published by Collins Crime Club in June 1932.
10 Christie, Autobiography, p368
11 Ibid.
12 The National Archives, Kew. Passenger Arrivals to the UK 1890-1960 Ref: BT 26/83/112. For a fine photograph of ‘Ascanius’ and other details search ‘Benjidog Historical Research Resources, the Allen Collection, Blue Funnel Line Ships 3’.
13 Christie, Autobiography, p370
14 Calculations of the number of ‘books’ Agatha wrote is complicated by the fact that in addition to her stand-alone novels, many of her short stories later appeared in book form as collections.