Archive for the 'History' Category

Hot tips for Tenerife’s top tapas

Thursday, April 26th, 2007
A tapas contest is one of the more unusual features of colourful celebrations to mark the anniversary of the founding of the Tenerife capital of Santa Cruz. A full range of events is planned for the week-long festival, starting on Sunday April 29 and continuing through to Sunday May 6. They take place across the city, but mainly in Plaza del Príncipe, Parque García Sanabria and Calle La Noria. The colourful series of events include an International Marionette Festival, several other puppet shows, an exhibition of flowers, a concert of Canarian music, and a flower crosses workshop and competition. The whole city will be decked out with traditional floral crosses and the highlight of the programme will be on the evening of May 2, a Great Canarian Fiesta with traditional Canarian dress a prominent feature. In 1999, the party, known as the Dance of Magicians, went ...

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Posted by Ken

Comments: Leave a Comment » Categories: All about Tenerife, Culture, Festivals, History, Locations, May celebrations, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Tapas, Tourism, eating

Exhibition reveals the secrets of old underwear

Saturday, April 14th, 2007
A hundred years of underwear is the unlikely theme of an exhibition currently being staged at the Museum of Anthropology in Tenerife. The years in question are from 1850-1950 and the exhibition includes more than 60 items of clothing that were once worn by men and women of the island, the grandparents, or even great-grandparents of today’s younger generation. The purpose of the exhibition is to show the rapid evolution in the design and use of materials in that time. The lingerie items that make up the exhibition are particularly well conserved because many of them have been hidden away in the depths of the museum for many years. Bodices, girdles, corsets, petticoats, nightdresses and other, more intimate items, including a heavy hand-knitted brassiere worn in the early 1900s, are included in the exhibition, part of the 20th anniversary celebrations of Casa de Carta in Valle de Guerra, ...

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Posted by Ken

Comments: Leave a Comment » Categories: All about Tenerife, Culture, History, La Laguna, Museums

New book courts Franco controversy

Thursday, April 12th, 2007
A new book to be launched in Tenerife next week will claim that General Francisco Franco, Spain’s former dictator, fathered an illegitimate son during his time as military commander of the Canary Islands in the 1930s. The book, ‘The Secret Son of Franco’, claims the child was the product of an affair with the wife of a lieutenant under his command. Spanish author Fernando Gracia will launch his new book in the Tenerife capital of Santa Cruz next week (April 20). The book will allege that the child was born just before Franco launched a failed attempt to overthrow Spain’s Socialist government in 1936, an action he directed from his base in La Esperanza, Tenerife, and which set in motion the bloody Spanish Civil War. He became leader of the right-wing Nationalist movement during the Civil War and became head ...

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Posted by Ken

Comments: Leave a Comment » Categories: All about Tenerife, General Franco, History, La Esperanza, Santa Cruz de Tenerife

Dragon tree reputed to be a thousand years old

Monday, April 2nd, 2007
dscf1950.jpg The Dragon Tree, or Drago, is one of the iconic symbols of Tenerife. It is very slow growing, but when it attains maturity it usually has a thick trunk which is crowned by a thick umbrella-shaped canopy of dagger-like leaves. It gets its popular name from the secretion of a reddish resin, know as dragon’s blood, which appears when either the bark or leaves are cut. It is thought that the original inhabitants of the island, the Guanches, used the blood-red sap from the tree in medicines and as an embalming fluid. Because it grows so slowly, generally taking ten years to reach a height of one metre, many of the taller specimens are believed to be hundreds of years old. The oldest, in the town of Icod de los Vinos (pictured above) in the north of the island, is ...

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Posted by Ken

Comments: Leave a Comment » Categories: All about Tenerife, Guanches, Icod de los Vinos, Nature, Photo-Blog, Science, Tourism

Head banging is hardly a new phenomenon

Saturday, March 24th, 2007
It seems that head banging is nothing new on the island of Tenerife. Long before holiday revellers brought head banging from the London clubs to the nightspots of Playa de las Americas, Tenerife had its own variation of the phenomenon A study of the skulls of the island’s original inhabitants by scientists at the Canarian Institute of Palaeopathology and Bioanthropology in Santa Cruz found that fractures were common among males in their 20s and early 30s, according to the Journal of Paleopathology. The scientists examined over 400 skulls pre-dating the Spanish invasion of the island in 1496. Some 10 per cent of the skulls showed circular cranial fractures, an injury rarely found among archaeological human skeletons. The pre-Hispanic inhabitants of the island, the Guanches, had weapons similar to the Argentinean bolas – two or more heavy balls attached to ...

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Posted by Ken

Comments: Leave a Comment » Categories: All about Tenerife, Guanches, Playa de las Americas, Santa Cruz de Tenerife