If I may answer this question, my grandfather came from Santa Cruz de Tenerife. The Canary Islands is a region (sort of like a U.S. state) of Spain. Before the advent of the airplane, the Canary Islands was a way station for shipping between the Americas and mainland Spain. Many Spanish people transited through the Canary Islands on their migration to the New World. Some waited there for years for their passage, and many thousands of children were born there while their parents waited to cross. That's how my grandfather was born. His parents were from Jaén in Andalucía and they were waiting for their passage to Puerto Rico in Tenerife.
In the late 1800s, Spain granted citizenship and land in the Americas to many non-Spanish Europeans in exchange for their loyalty to the Spanish Crown and the Catholic Church. This, added to a famine that was brewing in the Canary Islands, fueled a mass migration of Europeans and Canary Islanders to the Americas, especially to Puerto Rico, Cuba, Venezuela and the United States.
Most Puerto Ricans today are direct descendants of these late 1800s European emigrants.
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