The origin of this Canarian brewery dates back to 1924, when the La Tropical brewery was inaugurated in Las Palmas on the initiative of the businessman Cástor Gómez Navarro.
The activity of the new brewery starts with a small 50 HP diesel engine and eight workers capable of producing 2,000 litres of beer a day. A beer that could be enjoyed in an office open to the public at the company's headquarters on Calle Canalejas, just behind the brewery, where the blonde beer was served with a wide variety of tapas.
The outbreak of the Civil War brought the activity to a standstill, given the practical impossibility of importing the raw materials and machinery needed to brew beer. A paralysis that led to the bankruptcy of the young company.
Once the war was over, the factory was publicly auctioned and it was the businessmen Diego Vega Sarmiento, Vito Sánchez Jiménez and Miguel Curbelo Grondona who bought it to constitute the Sociedad Industrial Canaria (Sical) on May 12, 1939, with its head office in the establishment of La Tropical in Calle Canalejas.
Sical was constituted as a company producing and distributing beer and chocolate, thus prolonging the activity of the old family business that Gómez Navarro created in his day.
Until 1954, when it became a public limited company, Sical diversified its production in four areas: brewing, chocolate, coffee and also fishing, a fundamental sector in the Canary Islands at that time. The new company wanted to take advantage of the great Canarian-Sub-Saharan fishing grounds during the Second World War, and in fact Sical made an investment equivalent to 60% of the total of its fixed assets in 1945 and 1946 in the purchase of boats, equipment and fishing gear.
However, as the years went by, beer brewing became more important, so much so that the name of the company Sical was eclipsed by the brand of beer it produced: Tropical.
In this initial strategy of the company must have weighed, and much, the shortage of raw materials for the production of beer and chocolate. The second half of the 1940s, the years immediately after the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, was especially difficult. Spain was economically isolated and this isolation meant a shortage not only of raw materials, barley and hops, but also of fuels, machinery and spare parts. In 1949, beer production bottomed out and only 5,680 hl of beer were transferred to the cellar, almost half of the beer produced in 1944.
With such a dark outlook, it did not take long for losses to appear in the books, causing a treasury problem in the early fifties that almost inevitably led to a change in the corporate model. The innovations did not take long to arrive with its conversion into a public limited company in 1954. Then begins a qualitative and quantitative process of modernization and growth in all orders which allowed Tropical beer to recover much of the ground lost during the war and early post-war years.
These small changes in the old La Tropical brewery allowed production to increase progressively until the mid-1950s.
In 1960 the new factory of Barranco Seco was inaugurated which, with greater capacity and new technologies, allowed an enormous increase in production, progressively surpassing the 27,000 hl produced in the old factory to 100,000 hl in 1965. This increase led to a second expansion in the second half of the sixties. Production continued to increase until La Tropical became the main brewery in the Canary Islands, supplanting the Compañía Cervecera de Canarias, which had been the market leader since its foundation in the late 1940s.
The incipient tourist industry of the Canary Islands and the progressive opening of the Spanish economy after years of isolationism also had a lot to do with this development.
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