#canarian aboriginal

[raging-guanche]

"we were a colony too but at least we got independence lol" haha so funny!!! the colonialism, oppression and forced assimilation/cultural erasure of the indigenous people from the canary go through is so comical!!! not like it has caused poverty, racism and deaths!!!!!

[kandiwinged]

can white people start caring about something that isn't their fucking holiday homes. there's currently +3000 hectares burning down in a fire that was caused on purpose in Achinech (Tenerife in Spanish), but white people just seem to care about their fucking holiday homes to come here in the winter.

this fucking shit is the same from when the volcano in Benahoare (La Palma in Spanish) erupted. immediately trying to sell everything like a tourist attraction when it wasn't even SAFE.

just thinking about their fucking holidays. not about the people losing their home, crops, animals, their whole fucking lives.

but no, we're just a place to spend the holidays. just some tourist attraction. y'all go fuck urselves

[knario47]

VARIANTE LINGÜÍSTICA CANARIA

Dentro del amplio abanico de elementos identitarios de Canarias, el dialecto canario es, probablemente, el más significativo porque ha evolucionado con la historia de las islas🇮🇨

El próximo 🗓jueves, 24 de octubre, a la ⌚️19:00 en el 📍 Museo Elder de la Ciencia y la Tecnología , se presenta el documental 🎥"Canario. Prestigio y estigma del español de Canarias"🎥, posiblemente de la primera pieza audiovisual centrada exclusivamente en el español de Canarias

Un encargo de la Fundación Canaria Tamaimos y que elaboramos con mucho cariño en Creatívica: Agencia de Creatividad Canaria

Corran que las plazas son limitadas.

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/18uLGNvZBq/

[penelopelima]

The reason I don't talk a lot about being Canarian on the internet and straight up call myself Spanish is because I feel like it's such a small region that it's irrelevant in the grand scope of things, most people won't know it, and also because I'm weary that someone will try to misunderstand my words as me claiming to not be white or that I'm comparing this situation to others where the effects of colonialism have been leagues more destructive. But I do have complicated feelings about it and I have researched it a lot, so yeah if anyone has any interest in the topic, let me know, I love to talk about it.

[raging-guanche]

i remember being a little kid and listening to the legend about how gara and jonay jumped off of a mountain screaming "atis tirma" (to you, earth) cause dying together by suicide was more honorful than dying by the hands of the spanish christian colonizers.

until some years ago, christian church and Spanish state forbidden indigenous names.

nowadays, my ancestors mummys are exposed like thropies on museums against their wishes and the last big leader of the decolonization-independization movement died some years ago by police brutality at 27.

canarian aboriginal people are tired.

On christofacism and being a decent human being:

Merely wanting women and other child-bearing individuals to carry out their pregnancy isn’t Christofacism. Yet when the people who want to prevent abortions move to support legislation that prevents it being a legal option, then they are forcing people to live in a society that demands them to follow fascist tenants set by group of people who primary religion ends up being Christianity.

As far as being a decent human being, it’s my belief that a decent human being shouldn’t threaten homosexuals with violence because they want to celebrate the winter holidays without being reminded of Christianity. By the way, is this you?

To the LGBTQIA+ community: I, a cis-het man, wish you safety during the holidays and joyful fellowship with your loved ones.

To @that-catholic-shinobi : May God have Mercy on your wrathful soul.

[antiradqueer]

im aboriginal canarian with trauma for colonization, that makes me hate trace people heavily

i ended up in an argument with one of them where i said race is based on ancestry, ergo, biology, and they literally called me a nazi.

they called an indigenous, queer, disabled north african man, a nazi, for saying white people who pretend to be poc are weird and racist.

how is this logical 😭

none of their shit is logical, everyone who calls them out or doesn't like them gets called a n*zi terf and a christian for some reason, fucking disgusting you got called that

also funny thing they will call everyone a n*zi but then support people who "want to be" or "think they should be" n*zis.. like... ???

[osmanthusoolong]

This is absolutely fascinating, full text under the cut. (Obvious CNs for racism, colonial violence, Hitler mention and white supremacy.)

When he stepped ashore in October 1492, in what he understood to be part of India or Japan, Christopher Columbus’s first act was to claim possession of the land for the Spanish crown. After that, he distributed cloth caps, glass beads, bits of broken crockery, “and many other things of little value” to its inhabitants, recording in his diary that they were a “very simple” people, who could easily “be kept as captives…[and] all be subjugated and made to do what is required of them.” They reminded him of the aboriginals of the Canary Islands, the most recent victims of Castilian conquest, Christianization, and enslavement. “They are the colour of the Canarians, neither black nor white,” he observed.

Columbus also believed that the “Indians” regarded him and his crew as celestial beings. His earliest description of this, two days after landfall, was unsure: “We understood that they asked us if we had come from heaven.” But speculation soon hardened into certainty. Though the natives “were very sorry that they could not understand me, nor I them,” Columbus nonetheless confidently surmised that they were “convinced that we come from the heavens.” Every tribe he met seemed to think the same: it explained why they were all so friendly.

Over the decades that followed, this notion became a staple of Europeans’ accounts of their reception in the New World. According to the sixteenth-century Universal History of the Things of New Spain, compiled by a Franciscan friar in Mexico, Hernán Cortés’s lightning capture of Moctezuma’s empire in 1519 was made possible by the Aztecs’ misapprehension that he was “the god Quetzalcoatl who was returning, whom they had been and are expecting.” The following year, while rounding the tip of South America, Ferdinand Magellan’s crew encountered a giant native, “and when he was before us he began to be astonished, and to be afraid, and he raised one finger on high, thinking that we came from heaven.” The Incas of Peru initially received Francisco Pizarro as an incarnation of the god Viracocha, so one of his companions later wrote, and venerated the conquistadors because “they believed that some deity was enclosed within them.”

It was a popular, endlessly elaborated trope. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, white men colonizing other parts of the world were hardly surprised anymore to encounter similar instances of mistaken deification. After all, the error seemed to encapsulate the innocence, intellectual inferiority, and instinctive submissiveness of the peoples they were born to rule. What’s more, as Anna Della Subin explores in her bracingly original Accidental Gods, unsought divinity was a remarkably widespread phenomenon that spanned centuries and continents.

I In Guiana, the long-lived prophecy of “Walterali” commemorated Sir Walter Raleigh’s supposedly providential exploits against the Spaniards. In Hawaii, the death of Captain James Cook came to be regarded as the tragic apotheosis of a man mistaken for a god. Across British India, shrines sprang up around the graves and statues of colonists who were worshiped as deities with supernatural powers. The tomb of Sir Thomas Beckwith in Mahabaleshwar acquired a clay doll in his image, which received offerings of plates of warm rice. In Bombay, the effigy of Lord Cornwallis, the former governor-general, came to be permanently festooned with garlands and beset by pilgrims performing darshan, the auspicious ritual of seeing and being seen by a god who was present inside his likenesses.

Even as they battled to convert the local heathens from their misguided ways, Christian missionaries met the same fate. Long after he’d returned to Scotland, a portrait of the first chaplain of St. Andrew’s Church in Bombay, the Presbyterian James Clow, became the object of pagan veneration. In the church vestry, the congregation’s “native servants” offered up ritual homage to it and tried to carry off pieces of the canvas as personal talismans.

An especially celebrated cult grew up around the ferocious soldier John Nicholson, a staunchly Protestant Northern Irishman who’d begun his career in the disastrous British invasion of Afghanistan in 1839, then rose to become deputy commissioner successively of Peshawar and Rawalpindi. He was an unspeakably brutal man, who kept a severed human head on his desk, frequently expressed his immense hatred for the entire subcontinent, and begged his superiors to allow him to flay alive and impale suspected rebels—so instinctively violent were his proclivities that “the idea of merely hanging” insubordinate Indians was “maddening” to him. Yet before he died, while leading the pitiless British invasion, slaughter, and looting of Delhi in 1857, he had inspired a cult of hundreds of indigenous “Nikalsaini” followers, army sepoys and ascetic faqirs alike, who surrounded his unwilling figure at all hours, solemnly chanting prayers and rendering obeisance to their idol.

Something similar befell General Douglas MacArthur, the conquering hero of World War II. From Panama to Japan, Korea to Melanesia, his persona was made to take on divine properties of different kinds, in the form of wooden ritual statues, shamanistic shrines, and spirit persons, and as an avatar of the Papuan god Manarmakeri, whose return will herald the age of heaven. Even Western anthropologists not infrequently became enmeshed as involuntary deities in the very value systems they were trying, as neutral, external observers, to describe.

Resistance was always futile: disclaiming one’s divinity never seemed to dispel it. Nicholson was deeply revolted at being worshiped. He raged against the Nikalsainis who followed him around, kicked them into the dirt, beat and whipped them savagely, and imprisoned them in chains, yet they interpreted all this as “their god’s righteous chastisement.” “I am not God,” Gandhi repeatedly yet fruitlessly declared from the early 1920s on, as ever more elaborate tales began to spread about his supernatural powers, and he was pestered incessantly by people wishing to touch his feet. “The word ‘Mahatma’ stinks in my nostrils”—“I am not God; I am a human being.”

In 1961 a group of Jamaican Rastafarians traveled to Addis Ababa to meet for the first time with their living god, Haile Selassie. They were unfazed by the aging Ethiopian emperor’s own stance on the matter: “If He does not believe He is god, we know that He is god,” his apostles maintained. In despair, the Jamaican government invited Selassie for a state visit, hoping that his public disavowal of their delusions would sap the movement’s growing strength and political clout. “Do not worship me: I am not God,” the diminutive septuagenarian politely beseeched his dazzled followers when he arrived in the Caribbean. But this only had the opposite effect, for Rastafarian theologians knew full well what the Bible taught: “He that humbleth himself shall be exalted, and he that exalteth himself shall be abased.”

What are we to make of such episodes? As Accidental Gods brilliantly lays out, European observers were quick to jump to obvious-seeming conclusions. Accidental divinity bespoke the natives’ recognition of the personal greatness of their overlords: Nicholson was adored because he epitomized “the finest, manliest, and noblest of men,” as a typical Victorian paean put it. The question of why such worship sometimes alighted on arbitrary, obscure, and unheroic figures (violent sadists, deserters, anonymous memsahibs) was submerged beneath the general idea of effeminate natives in thrall to their masculine conquerors.

It was also believed to testify to their intellectual inferiority. As the academic study of religious beliefs developed over the course of the nineteenth century, European scholars defined “religion” in ways that classified the practices of “uncivilized races” as superstitious, backward, or “degenerate”—thereby further justifying colonialism. Compared to “real” religions with fixed temples, scriptures, and “rational,” monotheistic worship, above all Christianity, the beliefs of “the lower races,” they theorized, were stuck in an earlier stage of development. The worship of deified men was a primitive category error, “the irrational, misfired devotions of locals left to their own devices,” in one of Subin’s many luminous turns of phrase: proof of their inability to rule themselves.

In reality, from Columbus onward, Europeans repeatedly blundered into situations they didn’t properly understand and whose meaning they then invariably recast as vindicating their own actions. Across the Americas, the Pacific, and Asia, the indigenous terms and rituals applied to them were in fact commonly used of rulers and other powerful figures, not just of deities, and signified only awe, not some separate, nonhuman, “godlike” status. Likewise, because sudden death precluded reincarnation, people in India had for millennia been accustomed to appeasing the powerful spirits of those who were therefore eternally trapped in the afterlife—that, not reverence for white superpower, was why they singled out many random, prematurely deceased Britons for the same treatment. Nor was the apotheosis of living colonists usually intended to honor them, let alone to reflect some personal virtue: it was simply a way of mediating and appropriating their power, one way of creating collective meaning in the midst of imperial precarity and violence.

Above all, the very idea of a binary division between humanity and divinity was itself a peculiarly Christian dogma. In most other belief systems, the two were not strictly separated but overlapped. Reincarnations, communications with the spirit world, living gods, avatars, demigods, ancestor deities, and the powers of kings and lords—all were part of an interwoven spectrum of natural and supernatural authority. Much the same had been true in European antiquity. The ancient Greeks thought it normal for men to become gods. Among the Romans, apotheosis became a tool of statecraft, the ultimate form of memorialization. Cicero wanted to deify his daughter, Tullia; Hadrian arranged it for his wife and his mother-in-law, as well as for his young lover, Antinous. For emperors, it became a routine accolade—“Oh dear, I think I’m becoming a god,” Vespasian is said to have joked on his deathbed in 79 CE.

Similar ideas circulated among Jesus’ early followers. It was only from the Middle Ages on that the notion of humans being treated as gods came to be regarded by Christians as absurd, despite the fact that their own prophet, saints, and holy persons embodied similar principles. And so it happened that modern Europeans ventured abroad and began to impose their own category errors on the views of others. As Subin tartly observes, “correct knowledge about divinity is never a matter of the best doctrine, but of who possesses the more powerful army.”

Though Accidental Gods wears its learning lightly and is tremendous fun to read, it also includes a series of lyrical and thought-provoking meditations on the largest of themes. How should we think of identity? What is it to be human? How do stories work, grow, and stay alive? Belief itself, Subin suggests, is as much a set of relationships among people as it is an absolute, on-or-off state of mind. European myths about the primitive mentalities of others served to justify colonization and theories of white supremacy, and still do. Regarding indigenous practices as antithetical to the “reasoned” presumptions of “developed” cultures has always allowed Western observers to overlook their complicity in creating them—to see them only as the errors of “superstitious minds, the tendencies of isolated atolls, rather than a product of the violence of empire and the shackling of peoples to new capitalist machineries of profit.”

It also serves to mask the extent to which Western attitudes depend on their own forms of magical thinking. Our culture, for example, fetishizes goods, money, and material consumption, holding them up as indices of personal and social well-being. Moreover, as Subin points out, none of us can truly escape this fixation:

Though we may demystify other people’s gods and deface their idols, our critical capacity to demystify the commodity fetish still cannot break the spell it wields over us, for its power is rooted in deep structures of social practice rather than simple belief. While fetishes made by African priests were denigrated as irrational, the fetish of the capitalist marketplace has long been viewed as the epitome of rationalism.

To see a myth is one thing; to grasp it fully, quite another. It turns over, changes its shape, slips away, fades out of view. The further back in time Subin ventures, the more fragmentary her sources become, the larger the gaps in what they choose to notice. But more than once she is able to illustrate, almost in real time, how indigenous and Western mythmaking can be intertwined, codependent, and mutually reinforcing.

Following its “discovery” by Captain Cook in 1774, the Melanesian island of Tanna was devastated by centuries of colonial exploitation: its population kidnapped to provide cheap labor, its landscape stripped bare for short-term profit, its culture destroyed by missionary indoctrination. By the early twentieth century this treatment had provoked a series of indigenous messianic movements that looked forward to the expelling of the colonizers and the return of a golden age of plenty. The messiah would incarnate a local volcano god, it was believed, though the exact human form he would take was not clear.

One perennially popular idea was that the savior would appear as an American (perhaps Franklin D. Roosevelt, perhaps a black GI). This was because the island was under British and French control—movements of deification provoked by colonial injustice often sought to access the power of their tormentors’ rivals or enemies. In 1964 the Lavongai people of the occupied Papua and New Guinea territory sabotaged the elections organized by their colonial masters by writing in the name of President Lyndon B. Johnson, electing him as their king and then refusing to pay taxes to their Australian oppressors. On similar grounds, midcentury Indian and African religious sects sometimes deployed avatars of Britain’s enemies—in India, Hitler was seen as the final coming of Vishnu, while Nigerians worshiped “Germany, Destroyer of Land”: My enemy’s enemy is my friend.

During World War I, indigenous populations in far-flung Allied colonies independently developed cults of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who, it was said, would shortly sweep away the English-speaking whites who had stolen their land and were exploiting their people. High above the Bay of Bengal, on the plateau of Chota Nagpur, tens of thousands of Oraon tea plantation workers gathered at clandestine midnight services and swore blood oaths to exterminate the British. They spoke of the Germans as “Suraj Baba” (Father Sun), passed around the emperor-god’s portrait, and sang hymns to his casting out of the British and establishing an independent Oraon raj:

German Baba is coming,

Is slowly slowly coming;

Drive away the devils:

Cast them adrift in the sea.

Suraj Baba is coming…

The salient point is not that such hopes were untethered from reality, but what they expressed. For what can the powerless do? To what can they appeal to restore the rightful order of things, in the face of endless loss? “Do you know that America kills all Negroes?” a Papuan skeptic challenged one of LBJ’s apostles in 1964. “You’re clever,” the apostle replied. “But you haven’t got a good way to save us.”

Around this time, the British colonizers of Tanna were indoctrinating its inhabitants in the goodness of their young queen Elizabeth II and her handsome consort—a man, they learned, who was not actually from Britain, or Greece, or anywhere in particular. As it happened, the legend of the volcano god told that one of his sons had taken on human form, traveled far, and married a powerful foreign woman. Prince Philip vacationed in the archipelago and participated in a pig-killing ritual to consecrate a local chief. He was the Duke of Edinburgh, and Tanna’s island group had once been called the New Hebrides. In 1974 one of the many local messianic factions realized that he must be their messiah.

It proved to be a match made in heaven, for the British monarchy itself, in the twilight of its authority, was ever more reliant on invented ritual and mythmaking. Once Buckingham Palace learned of the prince’s deification, it began to celebrate and publicize the story for its own purposes, deftly positioning it as evidence of the affection in which the royal family (and by inference the British) were supposedly held all across the former empire, and as a counterweight to the prince’s well-deserved domestic reputation as an unregenerate racist. This Western interest in turn produced an unceasing stream of international attention and visitors to Tanna, to investigate and report on the islanders’ strange “cult,” which not only helped to strengthen the myth’s local appeal but even influenced its shape.

In 2005 a BBC journalist arrived on the island to report the story, bringing with him a sheaf of documents compiled by the prince’s former private secretary, including official correspondence from the 1970s, press clippings, and other English descriptions of the islanders’ beliefs. His sharing of these papers, and his lengthy discussions with the locals, inadvertently seeded new myths, many of which, as Subin dryly notes, sounded “much like palace PR describing philanthropic activities in an underdeveloped land.” Myths stay alive by constantly adapting, encompassing, and feeding off one another. This was a classic case of mutual mythmaking: the deification of Prince Philip was produced in Buckingham Palace and Fleet Street, as well as in the South Pacific. To this day, white men from Europe and America keep turning up on Tanna, claiming to be fulfilling the prophecy of the returning god.

In Subin’s irresistible medley of history, anthropology, and exhilaratingly good writing, the most powerful stories are those of indigenous mythmaking as outright political revolt. For in many instances in which white men were turned into gods, the purpose was wholly subversive: not just to channel the strength of the colonial imperium for one’s own ends, but to grasp the colonizers’ power and turn it against them. In 1864 a Maori uprising led by the prophet Te Ua Haumene killed several British soldiers. The head of their captain, speared on a pole, became the rebels’ protective talisman against other white invaders and their divine conduit to the angel Gabriel. Just as they reinterpreted the Bible to mean that Maori land should be restored and the British driven out, so too they appropriated a colonist’s actual mouth and made it speak their truth.

Even more unsettlingly, across their newly conquered African territories, from the 1920s onward British, French, and Belgian administrators found themselves faced with a strange contagion of spirit possession, in which the locals took on the colonists’ identities. People would fall into a trance and then claim to be channeling the governor of the Red Sea or a white soldier, secretary, judge, or imperial administrator. They demanded pith helmets and libations of gin, marched around in undead formations, issued commands, and refused to obey imperial edicts, calling themselves Hauka, or “madness,” in the Sahel, and Zar in Ethiopia and the Sudan.

One version in the Congo claimed to have created deified duplicates of every single colonial Belgian. Each time an African adept joined the movement, he’d adopt the name of a particular colonist, and his wife that of the spouse. In this way, Hauka captured the entire colonial population, from the governor-general down to the lowliest clerk. On entering their trance state, the locals usurped the colonists’ power: the wives went around with chalked faces and wearing special dresses, screeching in shrill voices, demanding bananas and hens, clutching bunches of feathers under their arms in representation of handbags.

Precisely because spirit possession was unwilled and painful, this was a means of resistance that mechanisms of imperial power could not easily counter. Early on, a district commissioner in Niger named Major Horace Crocicchia decided to suppress it by force. He rounded up sixty of the leading Hauka mediums, brought them in chains to the capital, Niamey, and imprisoned them for three days and nights without food. Then he forced them to acknowledge that their spirits could not match his own power, taunting them that he was stronger and that the Hauka had disappeared. “Where are the Hauka?” he jeered repeatedly, beating one of them until she acknowledged that the spirits were gone.

It only made things worse. Almost immediately a new, extremely powerful specter joined the spirit pantheon. All across Niger, villagers were now possessed by the vengeful, violent avatar of Crocicchia himself—also known as Krosisya, Kommandan, Major Mugu, or the Wicked Major. Deification of this kind was a form of ritualized revolt, a defiance of imperialist power that not only mocked but appropriated its authority.

All this also explains why, toward the middle of the twentieth century, the rise of a powerful, proud, anti-imperialist black ruler at the heart of Africa was so intoxicating to people on the other side of the globe who had been dehumanized for centuries because of the color of their skin. For black people in the Babylonian captivity of the New World, Ethiopia had long been held up as Zion, the land of their future return. Even before its dashing new emperor was crowned in 1930, American and Jamaican prophecies had begun to foretell the coming of a black messiah. Rastafarianism became a religion for all who opposed white hegemony: to worship Haile Selassie as a living god was to reject colonial Christianity, racial hierarchy, and subordination, and to celebrate black power. No wonder its tenets have spread across the globe and attracted nearly a million followers. As Subin’s rich, captivating book shows, religion is a symbolic act: though we cannot control the circumstances, we all make our own gods, for our own reasons, all the time.

[admelioraii]

The Canary Islands: In between fiery volcanoes and salty oceans

Canary islands

The Canary Islands are born out of volcanic fire, a process that is still ongoing.

What we see of the islands is just the tip of the iceberg, as the biggest part is under water.

“The fortunate islands” are as high as the Andean mountain chain, to be precise 6000-7500 meters high, counted from the sea bottom.

Moreover they form an actual underwater mountain chain which tops come out of the water as islands.

The first island to be born was Fuerteventura and the last ones La Palma and Hierro. Most of them are born as twins.

The volcanoes are just as much of a blessing as a curse, depending on which side of the coin you look at.

While lava and ash can be very destructive it also makes some of the best and most fertile soil in the world, as the Guanches ( the ancient aboriginal population) discovered in the 5th century, when they , as first , arrived on these, then unpopulated, islands.

Water resources:

They originated from Berber tribes in what today is Morocco.

When settling down on the islands, the Guanches had fertile soil and knowledge about agriculture, obtained prior to their arrival, the problem was water.As the salty ocean water was no source of irrigation and there are no rivers on the islands, apart from a few small springs.

The islands are created with mountains from the center til the north, thus rain falls mostly in the center and northern parts of the islands.

This rainwater is collected in lakes, wells , springs and small lagoons. The composition of the volcanic rocks helps in creating wells!!

As for most of the islands the southern parts are semi-desert.

One very peculiar source of obtaining water on these paradise islands is a phenomenon called “La Panza de Burro”. It is a gift to the Canaries, a natural way of gaining water from fog or mist.

Panza de Burro

The Canary Islands have almost perpetual north-eastern winds so called “trade winds”. These winds slowly drag the humid air masses, from the ocean with them to the islands, once by the islands, these air masses are forced to pass over obstacles like mountains and volcanoes, some which are extremely high.

This causes cooling of the ascending air masses which in turn creates a dense fog. The places where the fog is formed are situated about 900-1500 meters above the sea level, the air there consequently becomes rich in humidity. In these humid altitudes grows a tree called”Árbol de Garoe “(Ocotea foetens)

which has a special way of captivating the humidity from the air , with its leaves and turning it into water, like a natural water producing mechanism.

These trees have been so important to the islands that it now forms part of the coat of arms of el Hierro.

Cenobio de Valerón

Cultivation of cereals:

Having found natural sources of sweet water the Guanches proceeded with the cultivation of crops and cereals.

Especially famous for agriculture was Gran Canaria, where storage houses from the times of the Guanches are abundant.

One example is Cenobio de Valerón, an aboriginal grain storage where we find a system of hand excavated compartments on 8 levels, complete with silos, rooms, caves and cavities altogether more than 350 storage places in total.

This cave complex or compartment complex had separate doors for each room that could be closed. The doors were made of wood, stone or leather, they even had a seal with the owners name on it that was used both to identify the owner and to keep the food fresh, like a primitive fridge!

The sheer size of the cave complex is witness to the importance of agriculture on Gran Canaria.

This storage site once had towers framing the caves and making it an authentic fortress.

It is also the largest collective grainary built before Roman times.

In Gran Canaria we find at least 14 of these grain storages standing today, mainly in the center-north part of the island.

Almond Tree

We have established that the ancient Canarians cultivated grains, corn, barley etc as well as crops and root vegetables in large quantities.

What more did they eat?

The Guanches were tall , muscular and well built. They were healthy too, much thanks to a healthy and abundant diet with lots of variation.

They consumed fruit native to the islands, like “mocán” which is both the name of the fruit and the tree although the Guanches called it yoya. The Guanches even made medicine from it to cure intestinal problems.

Further they ate fruits of bellflowers (bicácaros), pine nuts as well as dates, figs, wild blackberries, and almonds.

Honey was very appreciated by the Guanches both as nutriciant and as medicine , the Canarian mountain honey is still an incomparable delicacy.

The Guanches were good shepherds which meant that meat and goat milk was consumed, they had a very peculiar way of fishing so fish and sea foods were definitely on their menu.

Besides, they also knew how to extract salt from the ocean.

It took the Spaniards 100 years to succeed in invading the islands, the Guanches were definitely no easy opponent, they were very tough fighters. When they finally arrived on the islands they were at least a head shorter than the Guanches. The average height of the Spaniards was 160 centimetres meanwhile the male Guanches measured at least 175 centimetres.

The Spaniards had, as well as many other Europeans suffered from several famine over the years as well as sicknesses, especially during the Middle Ages.

Blackberries

The Canarian population are exceptionally proud of their ancestry and even though the Guanches language or Canarian Berber is extinct, toponyms or names of places are still used today.

Living amongst volcanos:

The little we know about the Canarian Berber are mostly names of flora, fauna and especially terms for geographic denominations.

The Canaries differs from other places with volcanic activities in the sense that normally the vulcan is given a name like Eyjafjallajökull in Island or Kilauea in Hawaii but in the Canaries the traditional way of naming volcanoes is passed down from generation to generation starting with the Guanchean ancestors and it is different.

The volcano doesn’t have its own fixed name but every time a volcano erupts its name changes and it is renamed to fit its new shape, appearance and characteristics.

Many of both old and new volcanoes have Guanche names, but as the process of eruptions continues, the volcanoes change their appearance, so, their old descriptions no longer fit, and they are consequently renamed.

For example, the recent erupted volcano in La Palma has been called Teneguía (Guanche for palm trees) since 1971. After the recent eruption, talks about its new name are ongoing. One of the suggestions is Tajogaite (Guanche for split or cracked mountain).

Teide

On Tenerife, the biggest of the Canary Islands, we find Mount Teide it’s summit at 3.718 meters above sea level makes it the highest point in Spain.

Nevertheless measured from the ocean floor it’s height is 7.500 meters and that makes it one of the highest volcanoes in the world.

Teide’s base is actually situated on top of the remains of an old, eroded volcano.

Teide’s elevation makes Tenerife the highest island in the world, its National park surrounding the volcano is a world Heritage site of UNESCO since 2007.

Teide is the most visited natural wonder of Spain and its National park is the most visited National park in Spain and Europe.

Teide or” Esheyde” ( in Guanche ) means hell, or mountain of fire. It was important to the Guanches too.

An ancient Guanche legend tells that a devil lived inside Teide, when angry he unleashed fire and destruction.

To calm his anger the aboriginal population of Tenerife gave food and pottery as offerings.

Guaiota, the devil, was jealous of the beautiful, golden sun, Magec, as a result he made a trap, caught the sun and imprisoned it in his volcano, leaving the rest of the world in darkness.

The Guanches begged God to intervene and to liberate the Magec from captivity. God saved the sun and in turn imprisoned Guaiota in the volcano and to make sure he didn’t escape, the crater was sealed with a white lid, as a crown to the volcano. The legend says that Guaiota didn’t die but is sleeping inside the volcano, waiting to wake up.

The Canary Islands

Another famous legend from Lanzarote is the one of a devil that lived in the crater of the volcano Timanfaya.

There was a brutal volcanic eruption that buried a quarter of the island in lava.

That fateful day there was a wedding taking place, everyone in the wedding was surprised by a rain of lava, ashes and stones.

The guests started to flee but Vera, the bride, was trapped by a gigantic stone that fell from the volcano.

The bridegroom, Aloe, desperately tried to free his bride, but it was too late, his beloved died.

He got crazy of anger and ran around in the lava before disappearing into the volcano.

His image is now a symbol of the National park of Timanfaya, where a small curative plant grows that cures burns and other illnesses, called Aloe Vera.

The Green Cave in Lanzarote

The “Hotspot”:

The Canary Islands are located on the African continental tectonic plate and they are slowly moving in eastern direction towards the African mainland.

During 20 million years the islands passed over an underwater “hotspot” shooting up lava from beneath resulting in volcanic eruptions with the end result being the birth of the Canary archipelago.

Nowadays it is La Palma and El Hierro that are situated right above this hotspot, making them grow both in height and area, La Palma has a total height of 6.500 meters from the bottom of the Atlantic.

These new islands will keep growing meanwhile the older ones, like Fuerteventura and Lanzarote will slowly vanish due to erosion and forever disappear in the salty ocean.

The Canary Islands

In the time of the Guanches the archipelago was divided into nine kingdoms or Menceys.

As an example, Gran Canaria and Lanzarote had one king with centralised powers, as was the case in la Gomera.

Every kingdom had a king called “Mencey”.

Today these same kingdoms or Menceys still exist but now as municipalities, they maintain their original, ancient Guanche names until now , as is the case of La Orotava ( in northern Tenerife).

Even though the Guanches were not great sailors, they could travel from one island to another, partly because of the islands proximity one to another.

More common were the visitors from overseas. Ships from faraway Empires that were either trading with the Guanches or, as the islands have an important strategic location, they stopped by as they passed, to rest, explore the islands or wait for better weather.

Visits from other ancient empires:

According to chronicles, books and historical accounts the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks and Romans all had sailed to and had direct contact with the Guanches on “ the fortunate islands” or as the Romans called them Canary Islands.

Because of their exotic location, far from Greek temples and Roman amphitheatres, they have long been an inspiration to many classic writers and philosophers.

Plutarco witness; These islands are found in pairs, separated by a narrow trench of sea, they are called the fortunate islands.

The changes of season are imperceptible and through all of them blow a pure and healthy wind.

La Gomera

According to the Greek Atlántida was a big island, inhabited by rich citizens who were intelligent, just and generous.

It was when they became greedy that they were punished by volcanic eruptions and tsunamis, so powerful that the island was destroyed overnight!

They go on to tell that the ruins of Atlántida are to be found beneath the fortunate islands and that the new archipelago stands on top of the highest mountains of the island of Atlántida.

Whether this is true or not is left over to decide for the reader.

It is, however, according to many facts, some of which are mentioned in this article, more than plausible.

Regardless, why look for the lost Atlántida, when we have been given seven new wonderful and similar paradise islands.

Besides it is a good thing the Canary population is not greedy, in that way the islands will not again be lost, like Atlántida!!

Birth order of the Canary Islands;

*We normally call the ancient inhabitants of the islands Guanches but each island actually have their own denomination;

Fuerteventura. -Majoreros.

Lanzarote. - Majos.

Gran Canaria- Canarios.

Tenerife -Guanches.

La Gomera. -Gomeros.

La Palma. - Auritas.

El Hierro -Bimbaches.

Information and inspiration taken from years of personal experience and a close, special and private connection to the islands.

[gwendolynlerman]

Exspaining Spain: regions

Canary Islands (Islas Canarias)

The Canary Islands are divided into two provinces, Santa Cruz de Tenerife and Las Palmas, and include eight main islands, El Hierro, La Palma, La Gomera, Tenerife, Gran Canaria, Fuerteventura, Lanzarote, and La Graciosa. The capital cities are Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and Santa Cruz de Tenerife.

Architecture

The traditional architecture of the region is based on that of Andalusia and Portugal and is characterized by grand balconies, interior patios, wooden stairs, and colorful facades.

Climate

The predominant climate types are the tropical and desert ones, characterized by all year-round hot temperatures. There are two seasons, a wet and a dry one. The average temperature throughout the year is 21.2 °C (70.2 ºF).

Economy

The economy of the islands is primarily based on tourism, and they receive twelve million tourists per year. Other important economic activities are construction and banana and tobacco agriculture.

Famous people

Benito Pérez Galdós - writer

Carla Suárez Navarro - tennis player

David Silva - soccer player

Mara González - radio host

Paola Tirados - synchronized swimmer

Sergio Rodríguez - basketball player

Gastronomy

The Canarian diet is based on a combination of meat and seafood and was influenced by the aboriginal inhabitants of the islands (guanches) and Latin American cuisine. Typical dishes include papas arrugadas con mojo picón (boiled potatoes with a spicy red sauce), rancho canario (soup with chickpeas, lard, thick noodles, potatoes, and meat), pescado seco (dried fish), ropa vieja (chicken and beef with potatoes and chickpeas), and bienmesabe (a paste made with almonds, honey, and sugar).

Papas arrugadas con mojo picón

Dessert with bienmesabe

History

5th century BCE - Carthaginians

1st century CE - Romans

1402 - beginning of the Castilian conquest

1833 - creation of the Province of Canary Islands

1927 - division of the archipelago into two provinces

1982 - Statute of Autonomy

Languages

Spanish is the only official language. Canarian Spanish is similar to Andalusian and Caribbean Spanish. It is characterized by the use of ustedes for the second-person plural, seseo (lack of distinction between /s/ and /θ/, which are both pronounced [s̟]), aspirated /s/ at the end of syllables, and regionalisms such as chola vs. chancla (flip-flop) and guagua vs. autobús or bus (bus).

(Canarian Spanish vs. Standard Spanish)

Silbo Gomero is a whistled register of Spanish used in La Gomera. It enables messages to be exchanged over a distance of up to five km. UNESCO declared it a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2009.

Monuments and landmarks

There are four UNESCO World Heritage Sites: Garajonay National Park (La Gomera), Risco Caído (Gran Canaria), San Cristóbal de La Laguna (Tenerife), and Teide National Park (Tenerife).

Other landmarks include Maspalomas Dunes (Gran Canaria) and the Timanfaya National Park (Lanzarote).

San Cristóbal de La Laguna

Teide National Park

[carolinayourspiritmaster]

Happy day of the Canary Islands to all our Canarian-origin friends and customers around the world. In the picture, the Berber/Amazigh flag, symbol of our heritage as aboriginal Guanches.

[travelguidesblog-blog]

Tenerife - A The moment in a Lifetime Holiday

   Off the coastline of Africa, about 300 kilometers into the Atlantic Ocean lies the Island of Tenerife. It is the largest of the Canary Islands and is 1 of the autonomous communities of Spain. Tenerife is also the most populated, it has a population of about 900,000 and an space of 2034.38 sq. kilometers, and is also the just one that is most visited by travelers. Tenerife is available by sea and by air. It has two airports and can be achieved from the Spanish mainland by ferry, boat rides or even by renting a yacht. A holiday to Tenerife can in fact be a as soon as in a life span knowledge. Every little thing in water sports activities from snorkeling to deep sea diving is included in this island. A web-site not to be skipped is the drinking water park - Aqualand. To know more please click here. Tenerife holiday seasons need to be savored and not just rushed into and a system really should incorporate the night time existence. There are dining places bars and clubs that cater to everyone's taste and mood. The money city, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, has most of the night time places but that won't suggest that they are the finest. Some nightspots in the other metropolitan areas and on the beach locations are owned by the locals and there are also other folks where by the theme displays the non-indigenous proprietors.  1 tradition that is a ought to see is the Canarian wrestling, or Lucha Canaria as the locals connect with it. It is a activity that has been practiced from the moments of the first aborigines. It is a rapidly and interesting spectacle to watch the wrestlers twisting and turning and throwing just about every other down at the blink of an eye. An additional neighborhood activity is the 'Juego Del Palo' or the game of the sticks. It is really a blend concerning sword and adhere combating. If very little else passions you the wander by way of the slim streets and less than the whitewashed partitions ought to give you a peak into the long history of the islands. Addition to tips on how to make use of learn more about, you'll be able to call us on the website.

[raging-guanche]

sometimes i feel bad cause of my indigenous/north African features, then i remember that crackers "transition" to my features and want to be me so much they made a whole label and flag for it.

[dudewhoabides]

• Day & Night • mural. Or Good & Evil, Modern & Past, etc...Duality concept of this piece represents aboriginal men of Canarian Islands - Guanche pushing the night which is rolling on him as a huge black bubble - character. Aec • Interesni Kazki is the artist

[www5starcigar]

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Damn... @bostaffarts Artist: @saltodelpastorcanario @rubensosadelarosa The shepherd's leap (Spanish: Salto del pastor) is a folk sport practised throughout the Canary Islands. The origins of salto del pastor may date back to the Guanches, the aboriginal inhabitants of the islands prior to the Castilian conquest period of the early 15th century. Canarian shepherds required a specialised means of transporting themselves safely across ravines and down steep embankments, and settled on the use of long wooden poles known as lanza or garrote. These poles are fitted with sharp metal points called regatón . . . . . . #saltodelpastorcanario #saltodelpastor #bostaff #stickfighting #staffspinning #bostaffskills #kobudo #bojutsu #jodo #gunshu #kampfkunst #silambam #kungfumaster #kungfufighting #kungfutraining #flowstagram #gotflow #taichichuan #taichimaster #taijiquan #wushu #martialart #martialartstraining #ninjutsu #ninjitsu #chinesemartialarts ‎#artesmarciales #Боевыеискусства #artsmartiaux (at Planet Earth) https://www.instagram.com/p/CTBUdk5njgq/?utm_medium=tumblr

[fromthedust]

Montaña de Tindaya Project, Fuerteventura, Canary Islands  

Tindaya was meant to be the final masterpiece of the Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida: a sculptural intervention inside a majestic mountain in Fuerteventura, Canary Islands, which involved digging a 50 cubic meters cavity in the mountain. But Chillida, who died in 2002, never saw his dream project realized.

The project however, might eventually see the light of day, as the heirs have given the rights to the ambitious land art project to the government of the Canary Islands, El País reports.

But they have done so on a series of conditions: to “absolutely respect” the vision of the artist, to respect the environment, and to create a foundation in which both the heirs and the government will be represented.

Tindaya was conceived by Chillida in 1985 as “a mountain for men of all races and colors, a monument to tolerance,” in words of the artist. But the project was plagued by controversy and lawsuits from the start—launched by ecologists and anthropologists—which halted its construction before it could even begin.

The Canary Islands government tried to reactivate Tindaya back in 2011, when a public competition to carry out the €75 million project was briefly in the works. But a series of aboriginal carvings were found at the top of the mountain, and the project was halted, once again.

“Years ago I had an intuition, which I sincerely believed utopian. Within a mountain create an interior space that could be offered to men of all races and colors, a great sculpture for tolerance. One day arose the possibility of realizing in Tindaya, in Fuerteventura, the mountain where utopia could be reality. The sculpture helped protect the sacred mountain. The great space created within her would not be visible from the outside, but the men who penetrated her heart would see the light of the sun, of the moon, within a mountain turned to the sea, and the horizon, unattainable, necessary, nonexistent ...

The support given by the Canarian Government to the sculptural idea reinforced my illusion. I thought that the work would not provoke controversy in the Canarian people, to which I thought to donate the sculpture and my work in it. But I have seen that the sculptural project awakens in many, unforeseen resentments and suspicions, an opposition difficult to evaluate now in its true importance, but sufficient to reduce my enthusiasm until giving up the realization of the work. However I think it would be very positive to show the Canarian people and the whole world in an exhibition of models and drawings what was intended to be done in Tindaya.

The sculpture is conceived as a monument to tolerance, as I said, and is a work for the Canarian people. I do not wish, therefore, to serve as an element of division, much less as a stone of scandal thrown into political struggles, which I do not understand, and in which I do not wish to be involved.

I am only interested in the artistic debate, which unfortunately has not occurred. I have not heard or read any unfavorable criticism of the sculpture that has been made by someone who truly knows the project. But I know that some people who do not know have claimed that the work would destroy the mountain, when my work what I wanted was to save it.

Perhaps utopia can never be a reality. Maybe others will get it somewhere else. Or perhaps sculpture, that spacious and deep space, accessible to the light of the sun and to the moon, the meeting place of men, can reach the heart of the Sacred Mountain of Tindaya.”

                                                  Eduardo Chillida, press release - July, 1996

https://www.amazon.com/Montana-Tindaya-Eduardo-Chillida-Spanish/dp/8492226900

[radjabisol]

Archaeologists use DNA to identify earliest victims yet of slavery trade between Africa and Latin America ---- Archaeologists have used DNA to identify the earliest victims of the slave trade between Africa and Latin America. A team of investigators believed they discovered the slavery link after excavating a site on Gran Canaria, in the Canary Islands, Spain, in 2009. The remains on the site are thought to date back to the 16th century and testing by research teams, from universities in Britain, Spain, Peru and the US, unlocked the identity of their origins. DNA was extracted from the bones of the skeletons and revealed that the group was made up of a Canarian aboriginal woman, four black men and another six bodies belonging to native groups of Europe and Africa. Investigators have since published their findings in the 'American Journal of Physical Anthropology' magazine, as the most ancient burial of slaves discovered in the Atlantic World. | Daily Mail Online by Trending News