| Abstract
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This doctoral thesis, under the title "Territorial articulation in insular spaces: terrestrial communications in the Canary Islands from the XVI to the XIX centuries" , studies the road network in the light of its primitive structure, from the original settlements to the end of the XIX century. It contains seven chapters; the first one explains the reasons which led to the selection of this topic, and approaches the background, the current state of the related research, the sources (and the difficulties arisen from their use), and also methodology, then it lists the objectives. The second chapter tackles the relationship between the communications network and the insular spaces. The third one deals with the Canary Islands' regional environment, stressing the weight of the geographic elements on the influence and articulation of the terrestrial communications network. The fourth chapter analyses, in an archipelagic scale, the state of the routes in the XIX century, a moment in which the network was already established. The fifth one broaches the terrestrial communications in an insular scale, by analysing the process by which the network was created, from the XVI to the XIX centuries, in the islands of Fuerteventura, Gran Canaria and El Hierro. Those three islands are used to illustrate the different models applied in this research: the morphology of the road network in flat islands, in shield-shaped islands and in dorsal-shaped ones. In the sixth chapter, the analysis is brought to a local scale, the municipality of Santa Maria de Guía, in Gran Canaria, and the patrimonial values of roads and paths (which were functional elements for the territorial articulation) are recovered. Finally, the seventh chapter offers conclusions, a synthesis of the main results of this research.
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