This morning at eleven, the Paraninfo of the University of La Laguna filled with academic gowns, officials and families for the formal opening ceremony of the 2026/27 academic year. It was presided over by the President of the Canary Islands, Fernando Clavijo, alongside rector Francisco J. García Rodríguez, in front of around two hundred people representing the islands’ academic, political, institutional, cultural and social spheres, with the event streamed live on the university’s website.
The numbers behind the ceremony describe a university in full swing. Classes already began on Tuesday 8 September for the roughly twenty thousand students enrolled across the 55 degree and double-degree programmes on offer this year. The day before, on 7 September, the university had welcomed 3,980 new first-year students as part of the Hola ULL welcome days, an annual intake that renews the social fabric of San Cristóbal de La Laguna, the archipelago’s university town par excellence.
That’s no small detail in a context where demand for higher education on the islands increasingly intersects with other stories making headlines this year, from rising rents in La Laguna itself, where home prices rank among the highest in the archipelago, to competition from new private universities opening specific health-sciences programmes elsewhere in Spain. Founded more than two centuries ago, ULL remains the Canary Islands’ leading academic hub, and today’s ceremony symbolically marks the start of a year in which the institution will have to keep competing to attract and retain students on an island where the cost of living weighs increasingly heavily on the choices of those arriving from elsewhere.
In that sense, today isn’t just an academic ritual, it’s also a marker of how much the university still weighs, demographically and economically, on the daily life of a city that has built much of its identity around it.
