The timple: the Canary Islands' little guitar
Sooner or later, at a Canarian romería, you will hear it: someone strumming a tiny guitar, and the sound cuts across the square, through the chatter, even over the choir. That is the timple. In our article on the islands' festivals it only came up in a list, next to the guitar and the choir (Canarian fiestas and romerías). Now it is the instrument's turn.
Today it is one of the islands' sound symbols. But that sentence tells the end of the story, not the beginning.
Underneath lies an odd contradiction: the symbol is younger than you might think, while the word is older. If you want to see the instrument with your own eyes, it has its own museum in Teguise, on Lanzarote, and at the end of this article we tell you when it will next be played there.
What is the timple
According to the Casa-Museo del Timple, it is a plucked string instrument that at first glance looks like a small guitar and is played by strumming with the right hand (rasgueando, in Spanish). It is high-pitched and very loud, and its traditional role is to accompany parrandas, the impromptu musical get-togethers of the islands. The historical dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy (RAE) highlights its narrow sound box with a rounded back, and gives it four to five strings.
The usual timple today has five strings. The first and the fourth are the highest, the second and the fifth are lower and of equal thickness, and the third is the thickest and the lowest. According to the Canary Islands Government's education wiki, the standard tuning is D, A, E, C, G (re, la, mi, do, sol). In a few parts of Tenerife it is played with four strings: people remove the fifth and retune, but there is no such thing as a timple built with four strings, it is a local adaptation.
The top is usually made of pine, the back and sides of palo santo or mulberry wood (moral). The strings used to be gut and are nylon today.
And here comes the sentence the whole article rests on. According to FEDAC, the ethnography body of the Cabildo de Gran Canaria, the timple is not the oldest instrument of the islands, yet it has become a sound symbol of their tradition. It was not one: it became one.
A word older than the instrument's fame
The name comes from "tiple", the word for the highest member of a family of instruments. The museum and the RAE explain the difference in the same way: "tiple" became "timple" with an added "m" sound, which linguists call epenthesis.
In the Canary Islands, the first known mention dates from 1792. During Bishop Antonio Tavira's visit to Fuerteventura, the "tiplillo", a little tiple, accompanied the sword dance (danza de las espadas). From then on the mentions keep coming, and from the second half of the 19th century there are plenty of them.
The word "timple" itself, however, does not turn up here first, but in Murcia. According to RAE data, in 1845 a Madrid publication, the Semanario Pintoresco Español, printed it in an article titled "El huertano de Murcia", and later evidence also suggests this was the preferred form in Murcia. Around 1860, Benito Pérez Galdós had already included "Timple" among his Canarian words, the "Voces canarias", and around 1861 he wrote of the "prosaic timple" which, together with the bagpipe (gaita), had pushed out the old instruments. If Galdós interests you too: Casa-Museo Pérez Galdós.
In 1953 a Las Palmas newspaper was already calling the player a timple too, and in 1984 the RAE dictionary listed the word as Canarian and Murcian.
So the word was around long before the instrument was built on a regular basis. That is what the next part is about.
Teguise, a workshop and a man
If the timple's story has to be pinned to a single place, that place is Teguise, on Lanzarote. We have written about the town itself in our Lanzarote article; here we only look at its workshops.
According to the museum, the first permanent timple makers worked on Lanzarote, and the key figure is Simón Morales Tavío, who began building the instrument more systematically in the mid 20th century. According to the Teguise municipal archive, he was born on 30 October 1897 in the village of Soo. His father called the instrument a "tiple", and by studying its shape he built a similar one.
By the 1940s Simón's timples were famous across the whole archipelago, which is why, when a crafts school (Escuela de Artesanía) was founded on Lanzarote in 1943, Teguise was chosen as its seat. Simón died on 5 December 1967 in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, where he had travelled to see a doctor. His instruments can be found today in the music museum in Barcelona, in New York and at the Casa-Museo in Teguise.
The workshop stood in the Vera Cruz quarter, where the Lanzarote timple got its start. The door of the "Taller de Artesanía" has been closed since 12 April 2013. According to the museum, Teguise, through its craftsmen, played a fundamental role in spreading the timple to the other islands.
A symbol made by records, television and concert halls
So where does the symbol come from? Researcher José Luis Hernández Ramos summed it up for the Diario de Avisos in 2022: the timple went from being a plain accompanying instrument, one that some people even looked down on a little, to one of the symbols of the Canary Islands.
In the mid 20th century, Leocadio Machado took part in the first record on which a timple was heard. Records, and then television, including a show called Tenderete, made the Tenerife timple players well known from the 1960s and 1970s. You will find what the word "tenderete" means in our Canarian dictionary for tourists.
In 1954 Totoyo Millares founded the first timple school, where thousands of students learned. He helped form Los Gofiones (1969) and, in 1983, the first Orquesta Popular del Timple. He died in 2022, at the age of 86.
In the 1990s a new generation arrived and took the instrument into new territory: José Antonio Ramos into jazz, Domingo Rodríguez "El Colorao" into folk music, Benito Cabrera into symphonic music. Ramos started learning with Millares at the age of nine, and he created the electro-acoustic timple, built by the luthiers Jesús Machín and Juan Molina. He died in 2008. In 2009 Cabrera gave a concert at Carnegie Hall in New York, and beforehand he put it like this: arriving at Carnegie Hall with a timple is like walking into the biggest place possible with your pocket full of the smallest coins.
What the official paperwork says, and what it doesn't
The strongest formal recognition is an education decree. Royal Decree 300/2019 (Real Decreto 300/2019) created a timple specialty in professional music education, and states that the timple is "an element of identity of Canarian music", as well as the most representative instrument of the islands' native music. According to an April 2019 press release from the Canary Islands Government, that school year the timple was already among the instrument specialties of the conservatories' elementary music courses.
The timple, however, is not a BIC (Bien de Interés Cultural), which means it has not received the Canary Islands' highest heritage protection category. In May 2025 the Canary Islands Parliament unanimously asked the government only to study whether it could be declared a BIC as intangible heritage, and to support the traditional instrument makers. It was in that debate that someone said: "Where there is a timple, there is a piece of the Canary Islands." In May 2026 the director general for cultural heritage said there are 456 BICs on the islands, and that the category "is becoming a figure of prestige rather than a figure of protection".
There is one voice that also questions the symbol story. Víctor Landeira's doctoral thesis, defended at the University of La Laguna (ULL) in 2020, examines the timple's social role since the late 18th century, and criticises the discourse that elevates it to an identity instrument. In his view, mass media and recordings also played a big part in this. If the islands' other sound heritage interests you, we have written about Gomera's whistled language here: Silbo gomero, the whistled language of La Gomera.
What we don't know
We don't know exactly where the timple comes from. According to the Canary Islands Government's education wiki, there is no document that proves its precise origin. What is accepted is its kinship with the Renaissance and Baroque guitars and vihuelas which, according to the museum, the Portuguese and the Castilians carried with them on their voyages to and from the Canary Islands and South America.
The museum itself writes that there are few studies that clarify its forerunners clearly and with proof. It does not rule out a possible African influence, but it sees the European origin as evident, because the timple is related to the Bolivian charango, the Venezuelan cuatro, the Hawaiian ukulele, the Spanish guitarro and the Portuguese cavaquinho. We have not found a specific Berber origin theory in any reliable source.
The 18th-century guitar manuals, the books by Pablo Minguet (1752) and Andrés de Soto (1760), describe the "Tiple" as a small guitar meant for accompanying and "making noise". In a 2016 study, however, Landeira warns that these books have not always been interpreted correctly. According to Hernández Ramos, the timple was born on the eastern islands, Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, and reached Tenerife through the port of Santa Cruz. And the first mention from 1792 is quoted only by the museum's panel: we have not seen Bishop Tavira's original record.
For the nickname "camellito", meaning little camel, there are two explanations, and they don't fit together. According to the museum and the Gran Canaria tourist board, it was called that because of the hump-like bulge (peta) on its back. According to the Teguise archive, Simón Morales had built boats before, and he carried the shape of a ship's keel over to his timples, which is how it got the name. Which one is true, we don't know.
Why it matters today
According to the education wiki, there is no single building method: every workshop works with its own templates, with different sizes and decoration. Antonio Nuez Santana from Telde made thirty timples a month, for more than sixty years. At the start of Hernández Ramos's research, the list of Tenerife instrument makers came to about ten names; by the end, to some fifty.
Germán López wanted to play the guitar, but his fingers could barely reach the strings, so a teacher suggested he start with the timple. His master became José Antonio Ramos, and today he is an acclaimed timple player himself.
If an instrument becomes a people's symbol because it gets recorded and ends up on screen, is it any less theirs than if it had always been one?
Where to hear and see it
The Casa-Museo del Timple is in Teguise, in the Palacio de Spínola. It was set up by the Canary Islands Government's directorate for cultural heritage, it is run by the Teguise town council, and its director is Benito Cabrera. One room shows the timple's relatives from all over the world, and thanks to its good acoustics it also works as a small concert hall. Another presents timples built with the latest technology, and there is also a reconstructed craft workshop. In 2026 the museum turns fifteen. Check the opening hours and how to get there on Teguise's tourism website. While you are there, the Teguise market and the pirate museum at the Castillo de Santa Bárbara are close by.
From the museum's 2026 programme, these dates are still to come after this article is published:
20 November, 20:00, Casa-Museo del Timple: "Noches de Timple y Vino", a welcome to the year's young wines with the show "Archipiélago inverso", featuring timple player José Luis Hernández and guitarist Samuel Delgado, both teachers at the Tenerife Conservatory of Music. We have written about the new wine here: Canary Islands grape harvest: wines and wineries.
13 December, 12:00, Convento de Santo Domingo, Teguise: "Menudos timplistas", the annual showcase of students from Lanzarote's music schools.
You will find the full programme on the museum's official website. In December, "Agüimes en Cinco Cuerdas" returns to Agüimes, a concert dedicated to the timple with Germán López, Benito Cabrera and El Colorao on stage together; the date is in our events calendar. We keep adding other concerts and festivals to our events calendar.
Sources: Casa-Museo del Timple (casadeltimple.org: Orígenes, Teguise, 2026 programme); Ayuntamiento de Teguise, tourism and town news (2022); Archivo Histórico Municipal de Teguise; RAE, Diccionario histórico de la lengua española and Tesoro de los diccionarios históricos; FEDAC, Cabildo de Gran Canaria (culturatradicionalgc.org); Canary Islands Government, education wiki (CanariWiki) and press release (2019); BOE, Real Decreto 300/2019; Boletín Oficial del Parlamento de Canarias, issue 199 (2025); elDiario.es Canarias Ahora (2025, 2026); Diario de Avisos (2022); RTVC (2022); Canarias7 (2024); Ayuntamiento de Artenara; Benito Cabrera's official website; Turismo de Gran Canaria; Dialnet (V. Landeira Sánchez, 2016 and 2020); isladelanzarote.com (2026).
Cover photo (cropped): a traditional timple in a display case at the Casa-Museo del Timple in Teguise. Respubliko de Gvapolando, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
