The Guanches lived in all over the Canary archipel but it seems they did not have connections between the ilands. What they all had in common with each other was the language. The word Guanche means the native people from the Canaries. Some words of this language are even found in todays language or dialect.

By the 14th century the islands were conquered by the Europeans and they discorvered the Guanche society. Many Guanches were killed or enslaved. The concquerors described the Guanches as tall and strong people, many of them with blond hair and blue eyes.

Today we find in memory of the Guanches, in front of the main square of Candelaria, statues of the last kings-guanches, callled Menceys. It´s worth to visit the Guanches of Candelaria one day and enjoy the surroundings of Candelaria on the Isle of Tenerife.

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 into the Guinness Book of Records when 8,000 people ate, drank and danced in the streets in traditional costume.

The fiesta week is centred around May 3, the date on which the city was founded way back in 1494.

The tapas competition is another popular feature and is now in its sixth year. Restaurants and bars specialising in tapas will compete in three classes – traditional, creative and Canarian.

Participating establishments will not be revealed until nearer the date, though generally they are concentrated around Calle La Noria and surrounding streets, which make up the old part of the city.

The winners will become part of a ‘Ruta de la Tapa’ (Tapas Route) through the city, a great way of exploring the ancient capital while at the same time tasting some of its best gastronomic offerings.

May is a great month of celebration in Santa Cruz and the rest of the island, reflecting the traditional culture, history and religion of the island, and is marked by processions, pilgrimages and sporting contests.

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, La Laguna.

The ‘Letter House’ is an 18th century Canarian family mansion now dedicated to the popular culture of the archipelago, featuring ceramics, furniture and traditional dress down the ages.

The underwear exhibition continues until May 31 and the museum is open from Tuesday to Sunday from 9am to 7pm. Admission is free.

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 of state when the Republican forces were defeated in 1939. He ruled until 1975, presiding over what was for many years a harsh and brutally repressive regime.

Franco was a staunch supporter of the Roman Catholic church while in power, which is why the new book will be seen in Spain in such a controversial light.

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 reputed to be a thousand years old, though it is generally accepted in the scientific community that in reality it is somewhere between 600-800 years old. It is, nevertheless, a popular tourist attraction.

The difficulty with accurately determining the age of a drago is that it does not display annual growing rings, but instead can only be dated from the number of times it has flowered.

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 a cord.

Over 80 per cent of the fractures show clear signs of healing, says the report, though the scientists suspects that brain damage must have resulted from the injuries.