The Guanches: who the first Canarians really were
An island always has more layers than you can see from the beach.
Mention the Canaries and the first thing that comes up is sand. The volcano. The price of a flight in January. All true, and all the top layer. Let us dig down one.
There is a square in Candelaria where nine men of bronze stood with their backs to the ocean, facing the island. Not saints and not conquistadors. The last kings of an island that no longer exists the way they knew it. Not because it sank, but because it stopped being what it was.
One thing is worth saying straight away, before anybody books a flight: the statues are not there right now. Further down I explain what happened to them, and what is still there even though they are not.
A great deal circulates about the Guanches. Atlantis, lost peoples, hidden knowledge. Most of it is invention. But there is one thing that contradicts every legend at once, and that is why it is worth stopping in front of it: they really were here. And we know where they came from.
Just not from where you would expect.
How we know who they were
For centuries the answer said more about what we wanted to believe than about what had happened. Atlantis. Shipwrecked Greeks. A people out of nowhere.
That is understandable. An island people without boats is a puzzle that imagination solves faster than patience does.
Then the answer arrived, and it came from no chronicle and no legend. It came from the DNA of their own dead.
It is worth pausing here, because this is lovelier than it sounds at first. The Guanches mummified their dead and buried them in caves that were hard to reach, with grave goods. They did it so that they would rest. Two thousand years later it was precisely those mummies that made it possible to read their genome. The people they hid so that no one would disturb them ended up telling us where they came from.
And what they said is clear: North African in origin, related to the Amazigh (Berber) populations of the continent. Not a hypothesis, not a theory. A result published in scientific journals, resting on biological material rather than on chronicles written by the winners.
Archaeology places human presence on the islands at least from the 5th century BC. And there is one detail that rearranges the whole picture: they did not arrive all at once. The differences between samples from one island and another point to several waves of settlement, not a single founding voyage.
What remains open is worth saying, because almost nobody does: we do not know how they crossed. No boats have survived, and by the time of the conquest the islanders no longer sailed between islands. Somebody made that journey, and then the knowledge was lost. It is one of the most interesting unanswered questions in the Atlantic, and we can leave it that way. Not every gap has to be filled.
Did you know? On La Gomera the silbo gomero is still taught in school: a whistled language that carries a message from one ravine to the next. It is on the UNESCO list of Intangible Cultural Heritage. A language whose speakers ran out, and which every Gomeran child learns today.
They were not one people, but many
Here is the most repeated mistake: talking about "the Guanches" as if they were a single block.
Strictly speaking, Guanche was the name of the aboriginal people of Tenerife. On the other islands there were other peoples, with other languages, other structures and other names. We settle them today with a single word because it is convenient, but that never made them one people.
On Tenerife, when the Castilians arrived, the island was divided into nine menceyatos: nine independent kingdoms, each with its own mencey, or king. Taoro, in the La Orotava valley, was the most powerful, and its mencey acted as first among equals. The others were Anaga, Tegueste, Tacoronte, Icod, Daute, Adeje, Abona and Güímar.
On Gran Canaria, by contrast, power was organised differently, around guanartemes and a council of nobles. Two islands you can see from one another on a clear day, and two entirely different political worlds. Think about what that means: within a distance you can take in at a glance, two separate answers to the same question about how to live together.
Now comes the part most guidebooks step over in silence, and we will not.
That Tenerife was divided into nine menceyatos is documented history. The list of the nine kings is not so simple. Some names do appear in early sources. Others — the most disputed being Pelinor of Adeje — many modern historians consider literary invention. Antonio de Viana wrote the conquest in verse in the 17th century, and what came out of his pen still circulates as though it were a chronicle.
From the same poem comes the best-loved figure of all: Princess Dácil, daughter of Bencomo, in love with a Castilian captain. Historians consider her a fictional character too.
And now ask yourself the question I asked when I first looked into it: does it matter?
Because her name is on streets, on hotels, and on girls born on the island. Four centuries of people saying it out loud. That something is invented does not mean it is not real, only that it is not real in the sense you first expected. The island divided into nine is history. Part of the list of kings is poetry. And both live on the same ground without getting in each other's way.
What is left of them today
More than you would think, and almost none of it behind glass.
The names. Tacoronte, Güímar, Icod, Taganana, Tejeda, Timanfaya: aboriginal place names are still on the map and on your bus ticket. When you ask for directions in Tenerife, you are pronouncing words older than Castile.
The silbo gomero. On La Gomera a whistled language survives that can carry a message from one ravine to another. It is taught in the island's schools and is UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage.
Canarian wrestling. Lucha canaria, the traditional sport of the islands, has its own rules and pre-Hispanic roots, and is still fought in sand rings across the Canaries, including at the August fiestas.
Gofio. The toasted grain flour you will find in any Canarian kitchen — and on restaurant menus — was already the basis of their diet.
None of this is in a museum. It is on the street, in the school and in the kitchen. An extinct people does not leave behind a living grammar, a food and a sport. This list is precisely the proof that they did not disappear.
A note if you are coeliac. Aboriginal gofio was made from barley, but what is served today in most places contains wheat or a mix, which means gluten. Watch out especially for escaldón, the thick paste of broth and gofio. If you have to avoid gluten, look for gofio made from 100% millo (maize) and ask about cross-contamination. Here it is not a strange question: you will get a straight answer.
Where to really meet them
If you want to go from reading to seeing, three places are worth the trip.
Cueva Pintada, Gáldar (Gran Canaria)
A museum built literally on top of a buried aboriginal village, with a glass dome protecting the wall paintings. Visits are guided and you have to book a time in advance: this is not a place you walk into on the spur of the moment. Open Tuesday to Saturday, 10:00 to 18:00 (last tour 16:30), and Sundays and public holidays 11:00 to 18:00. Phone: 928 895 746.
Museo de la Naturaleza y Arqueología, Santa Cruz de Tenerife
This is where the mummies are. It is the collection that makes you understand in one go what no reconstruction manages to convey: that we are talking about people, with funeral care, with grave goods, with families. If you are going with children, prepare them a little beforehand.
The square in Candelaria — note: they are not there right now
The nine bronze statues of the menceyes, by the sculptor José Abad, were unveiled on 15 August 1993 in front of the basilica, with their backs to the Atlantic, and they are probably the most recognisable image of the aboriginal past anywhere in the Canaries.
But if you go today, you will not find them. In July 2025 all nine figures were lifted off their plinths to allow the complete redevelopment of the Patrona de Canarias square. They are in temporary storage and will return once the works are finished — a project scheduled to run for years, and already behind.
We are saying this because nobody else does: we do not want you making the trip planning to photograph them and finding empty plinths instead. The photographs in this article are from January 2025, before they were taken down.
The good news is that an empty square cancels none of what comes next: the August fiestas go ahead exactly as always, and the central act does not even happen in the square.
And now, in August: the Guanche returns
There is one date when all of this stops being history and becomes something you can watch.
14 August is the big night. At 19:15 the procession of the Virgin leaves the basilica, accompanied by the Las Candelas music band, and heads to the ground beside the town hall. Then at 20:00 the Colectivo Guanches de Candelaria perform the rite of the finding of the Virgin on the beach — not in the square, which is under construction — with costume, fire and hundreds of participants. Afterwards there is a procession to the well and fireworks from the pier.
It is not a show staged for visitors: it is part of the town's festive calendar, and the crowd watching it is mostly islanders.
And there is one detail that changes how you see that ceremony entirely. The Guanches found the image on the beach before the conquest, and they did not venerate it as a Christian icon — they could not, they had not yet encountered Christianity — but as a deity of their own: Chaxiraxi, "she who holds up the sky".
What is re-enacted every 14 August is therefore not the arrival of a new faith. It is the moment a people found something on the shore and gave it their own name. The devotion that followed was built on top of that encounter, not in place of it.
There are more days around it:
5 August — opening address of the fiestas of the Patron Saint of the Canaries
12 August — Villa de Candelaria International Folklore Festival
13 August — Canarian wrestling bouts in honour of the Virgin
14 and 15 August — fiesta of the Virgin of Candelaria, patron saint of the Canaries
15 August — Patron Saint's Day: solemn mass, procession and a rain of rockets
A practical warning, because nobody mentions it until you are already there. Candelaria fills up on those days: many pilgrims arrive on foot from other towns, roads are closed and parking in the centre is close to impossible. Come early, or come by bus — check the timetables the day before, as extra services are usually laid on in August. And above all: the square is open stone with not a scrap of shade, in the middle of August, with a high chance of calima, the Saharan dust haze that pushes the heat up. Hat, water and sun cream, especially if you are claiming a spot early for the ceremony.
The Guanches did not vanish overnight and the sea did not swallow them. They were conquered, and then they mixed with the people who came, and that mixture is what says guagua for the bus today, eats gofio and whistles across the ravines of La Gomera. The nine statues in Candelaria do not commemorate an extinct people: they point at the grandparents of the people living on the other side of the square.
If you are going to be in Tenerife in mid-August, go and stand there a while. And stay until the sun drops: the bronze menceyes are looking in exactly that direction.
Because in the end the question is not what became of them. That much is visible: they are here, in the language, in the food, in the faces. The question is rather what we lost by settling nine separate worlds with a single word. Which of those names would you say first, if you wanted to learn the real one?
