San Borondón: the island that appears and disappears
Ask how many islands make up the Canary Islands, and today the right answer is eight: seven islands with their own island government, plus La Graciosa, as listed in the 2018 Statute of Autonomy. In our article on the quiet islands we introduce the smallest one too.
The old maps, though, had one more.
Not some forgotten rock, but an island that more than a hundred witnesses saw on the western horizon during a single official inquiry, an island that kings granted to their subjects and that expeditions set out to find. It is called San Borondón. According to the records, it appears, then disappears before anyone can reach it. A Spanish publication from 1950 was still titled "The eighth island". Now that La Graciosa counts, it would be the ninth.
Let us get the practical part out of the way: you cannot sail to San Borondón, because it does not exist as land. A Captain General of the Canary Islands put that in writing as early as 1721. What people saw, however, is real, and on La Palma there is still a spot where you can look west for it. Here is what we know for sure, and what we do not.
A monk and a whale
The name comes from an Irish monk. Saint Brendan (Brandán in Spanish) lived in the 6th century and founded the monastery of Clonfert in Ireland. According to the legend, he set out with fourteen fellow monks to find the land promised to the saints.
On the way they found several wondrous islands, and one of them later became San Borondón. The monks went ashore and lit a fire, and the island moved beneath them like a wave. Brendan then told them they had not been standing on an island at all, but on the largest fish in the sea, which keeps trying to bring its tail round to its head but is too big to reach. Its name is Jasconius.
The Latin text that tells the story, the Navigatio, became one of the most widely read works of the Middle Ages. Its full Latin version survives in around a hundred manuscripts, alongside nearly fifty abridgements, imitations and vernacular adaptations. In Spanish the saint's name lives on in a great many forms (Brendán, Brandán, Brandón, even Bolondrón), and in the Canary Islands it became San Borondón.
From the islands' pre-conquest inhabitants, no record survives to show that they knew of it. Whether they ever saw it, we do not know. We wrote more about them in our article on the Guanches.
1570, the year of San Borondón
One year deserves a closer look, because it has everything. In 1570 the island appeared in the west so often that two historians, Luis Regueira Benítez and Manuel Poggio Capote, simply call it "the year of San Borondón".
On 3 April, Hernán Pérez de Grado, regent of the Royal Court of the Canary Islands (Real Audiencia), ordered the authorities of La Palma, El Hierro and La Gomera to gather every piece of information and to question everyone who had seen the island. The governor of El Hierro, Alonso de Espinosa, took statements from more than a hundred witnesses, and they agreed that they had seen it to the northwest. His report has not survived.
The most surprising testimony came on La Palma. Pero Velo, a Portuguese pilot from Setúbal, said that on his way home from Brazil, during a storm, he had landed on San Borondón. He saw huge footprints in the sand, the remains of a fire with leftover food, plenty of livestock, and a cross nailed to a tree. A thick cloud forced him back to the ship, and two of his sailors stayed on the shore. The next day, when he went back for them, the island had vanished. The chronicles do not agree on whether two or three sailors were left behind: Leonardo Torriani says three.
That same year Hernando de Villalobos, a councillor of La Palma, set off with three ships to search for the island, and according to the chroniclers came back "empty-handed". In the General Archive of La Palma (Archivo General de La Palma), the papers of a second expedition organised at the same time have also come to light: the physician Melchor de Lugo prepared it with a few prominent citizens of Santa Cruz de La Palma. The two historians' study on it is free to read.
Royal grants for a land never found
The fever of 1570 did not come out of nowhere. By the middle of the 15th century the island's existence seemed so certain that King Afonso V of Portugal granted it several times, to different people. Gonzalo Fernandes, a man in the service of the king's younger brother, the Infante Fernando, saw it in 1461 on his way home from the fisheries of Río de Oro, and on 21 June 1473 Ruy Gonçalves da Câmara received a grant for an island he had seen himself. Historians say these letters were little more than blank paper, since they were only worth anything if the search succeeded.
Castile did not stay out of it either. In 1519 Francisco Fernández de Lugo, a councillor of La Palma, offered the Crown to "plough the sea" with three ships for up to a year, until he found the island he had often seen from La Palma and called Sant Blandián. In return he asked for the title of Captain General. Gabriel de Socarrás's contract of 1537 already speaks of the island of San Bernardo, and one researcher suggests that this name may simply have been a way to avoid San Borondón, which sounded too fantastical for Emperor Charles to take seriously. According to a study in literary history, a Spanish and Portuguese treaty signed in Évora in 1519 refers to it as "Non Trubada" or "Encubierta" (the hidden one).
The mapmakers drew it too. The 15th-century world map of Bartolomeo Pareto, a priest from Genoa, marks "the fortunate islands of Saint Brendan" in the west (Insulse fortunate sancti Brandanay). On Guillaume Delisle's French map of 1707 there is a small patch west of El Hierro, with the note that in this area "some authors have placed the fabulous island of San Borondón". The manuscript map in the cover photo, the Plan de las Afortunadas Islas del Reino de Canarias, was probably drawn in pen and watercolour in the 1760s, and San Borondón sits on it west of El Hierro. You can view the digitised version in the digital library of the Spanish Ministry of Defence.
Expeditions that found a cloud
According to a Canarian study, at least four expeditions set out to find it between the 16th and the 18th centuries, and from the 16th century alone there are reports of at least eleven sightings or landings. The most important ones:
1526: Fernando Álvarez and Fernando de Troya sailed out, to another failure.
1556: the Portuguese Roque Nunes, with his two sons and the priest Martín de Araña, got close to the island, but did not land, because they could not agree on who should set foot on it first.
1570: Villalobos and his three ships, empty-handed.
1604: the pilot Gaspar Pérez de Acosta and the Franciscan friar Lorenzo Pinedo set out from Santa Cruz de La Palma on 9 August. They took precise bearings on the island's position from the villages of Tijarafe and Puntagorda, then cruised the area for many days without finding the slightest trace of it. According to a modern summary, all they saw in the west were clouds and thin veils of cloud.
1721: in a time of severe economic crisis, natural disasters and epidemics, Captain General Juan Mur saw the island as a way out, and sent an expedition under Captain Juan Franco de Medina, which set off on 11 November.
Mur's letter on the outcome is still the shortest summary there is: he had sent the sailing ship San Telmo, well equipped and with two friars aboard, and "they did not find it, because it is not there". (One older source names Captain Gaspar Domínguez as the leader, but according to archival research this is wrong.)
The photograph, 1958
The sightings did not stop. On El Hierro, on 29 July 1723, crowds saw the island: the friar Luis Rey was just getting ready to perform an exorcism against the plague of locusts ravaging the island, and had to improvise a second one against San Borondón. The parish priest of Tijarafe, Juan Smalley, drew it in 1730. On La Gomera, a Franciscan friar drew it too, from Alajeró, at six in the morning on 3 May 1759, in front of the parish priest and forty other people.
Then came the camera. The photographer Manuel Rodríguez Quintero (who lived from 1897 to 1971) photographed the outline of the island from Las Martelas, in the municipality of Los Llanos de Aridane. The picture was made public a few months later, in August 1958: Luis Diego Cuscoy wrote about it in the 10 August issue of the daily ABC, under the headline that the wandering island of San Borondón had been photographed for the first time.
Another recording was made on 18 October 2003, from the least expected place: the writer and journalist Jaime Rubio Rosales filmed shapes rising to the northwest, off the Anaga coast of Tenerife, from San Andrés y Bañaderos on Gran Canaria.
What we know for sure
The island does not exist as land. According to historians, the Captain General was right in 1721.
What is beyond dispute, however, is that the island can be seen. Some witnesses are entirely credible: in 1556 the Franciscan friar Bartolomé Casanova saw a huge island off Tenerife, off the coast of Punta de Teno, and researchers say testimonies like his confirm a real optical phenomenon.
The explanation took time to mature. In his 1772 history of the Canary Islands, José de Viera y Clavijo wrote a separate chapter on "the famous question of San Borondón" and distinguished three positions, the third being that of the critics and philosophers, for whom the island existed only in our eyes or our imagination. Viera found the idea that a cloud reflects the image of La Palma clever, but not solid enough. In the 19th century the mirage theory won for good. Francis Coleman Mac-Gregor, the British consul in Tenerife, called it a fata morgana, and a La Palma chronicler wrote that the island was still seen very often in those days, only nobody believed in it any more.
The meteorologist José Miguel Viñas explains what a fata morgana is. It is a superior mirage, which forms when there is a strong temperature inversion close to the sea surface: warmer air settles above a thin, cold layer of air over cold water. The boundary between the two layers bends light like a strong lens, and an inverted image of objects on the horizon appears above the original, as if floating in the air. The two images overlap, and this stretches the object, a coastline for example, vertically.
What we do not know
We do not know exactly which optical phenomenon lay behind each sighting. Historians speak of refraction, reflection or "any other optical phenomenon", and even Viera could not decide what kind of illusion it was. At AEMET, the Spanish meteorological agency, we found no material on San Borondón, and no analysis backed by measurements of any single Canarian sighting.
We do not know where those who claimed to have landed had really been. Researchers consider some of them lost sailors who were not where they thought they were; with others the witness's credibility is in doubt, as with Ceballos, who had fled Spain after killing a man. What land Pero Velo set foot on, we do not know.
We do not know whether Melchor de Lugo's expedition ever sailed: the careful preparations suggest it did, but there is no written record of its departure. Espinosa's hundred witness statements have been lost. And whether the Villalobos family's later financial ruin was caused by the voyage of 1570, the researchers themselves call pure speculation.
Why the islands still look west
Science took the island away, culture kept it. In February 1865 the La Palma weekly El Time ran, in fifteen instalments, the story of a certain Sancho Sánchez's voyage to San Borondón, who came home saying the island existed, he had seen it with his own eyes and walked it with his own feet. Between 1865 and 1880 the La Palma press used San Borondón to criticise local politics and society: the imaginary island became a mirror for La Palma.
That mirror still works today. In 1980 Los Sabandeños recorded a murga about it, and a 2011 song by Trío Zapatista is about running away to San Borondón to escape everyday worries, because there are no mortgages there and the mothers-in-law cannot find the way. In the 1996 novel by Juan Pedro Castañeda, a writer from El Hierro, the imaginary Oceánida lies beyond the old prime meridian, off Orchilla, the westernmost tip of El Hierro. Why the edge of the world ran exactly there is told in our article on the Canary Islands lighthouses. In 2005 an exhibition at La Recova in Santa Cruz de Tenerife presented the 1865 voyage to San Borondón of the English naturalist Edward Harvey. Neither the naturalist nor the voyage ever existed.
One coincidence is worth noticing. In 1604, the same year Pérez de Acosta sailed out, Antonio de Viana published the epic poem that gave us the legend of Princess Dácil. Our article on Dácil explores the same question as this one: where does history end, and where does the tale begin?
Where to look west
San Borondón may not be waiting for your boat, but anyone can look at the western horizon.
Tazacorte, La Palma: on the Tazacorte coast, on a natural terrace above the ocean, stands the San Borondón viewpoint, with two information panels. It is easy to reach on foot, there is no parking, and services are at the port, Puerto de Tazacorte. From mid-autumn you can see the North Star and Cassiopeia clearly from here; we wrote about stargazing on La Palma in our article on where to see the stars.
Tijarafe, La Palma: the island's position was taken from this village in 1604, and its parish priest drew it in 1730. This is where you will find the Mirador El Time, with views over the Aridane valley. Our article on the best viewpoints on La Palma gathers the island's other viewpoints, and our La Palma guide covers the full programme.
El Hierro: the western end of the island, around the Orchilla lighthouse, where the old prime meridian ran. For the rest of the island, see our El Hierro guide.
La Gomera: the 1759 drawing was made from Alajeró. We gathered the island's sights in our La Gomera guide.
Next time you stand on the coast of La Palma or El Hierro and the outline of an island takes shape where the map shows only sea, what will you see in it: a cloud, a reflection, or an island that nobody has reached in centuries?
Sources: Regueira Benítez, L. and Poggio Capote, M.: Una expedición de Melchor de Lugo para descubrir la isla de San Borondón (1570), Anuario de Estudios Atlánticos 53 (2007); Chaparro Domínguez, M. Á.: Revisión del mito geográfico de San Borondón y aproximación a su huella en la literatura y otras artes, Revista de Filología Románica 30/2 (2013, Universidad Complutense); Pérez Hernández, J. E.: Una isla y su sombra. San Borondón en la prensa decimonónica de La Palma, Revista de Historia Canaria 180 (1998, Universidad de La Laguna); Biblioteca Virtual de Defensa (Plan de las Afortunadas Islas del Reino de Canarias); Library of Congress (Delisle, 1707); Lanzarotto Malocello from Italy to the Canary Islands (Italian Ministry of Defence); José Miguel Viñas: Barcos voladores y otros espejismos marinos; BOE (the 2018 Statute of Autonomy of the Canary Islands); Hello Canary Islands (Turismo de Islas Canarias); Libertad Digital.
Cover photo (cropped): the western part of the manuscript map Plan de las Afortunadas Islas del Reino de Canarias, with San Borondón (1760s). Ministerio de Defensa, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The cropped image may be used under the same licence.