Archive for the 'Guanches' Category

„los Guanches“ of Candelaria

Thursday, January 1st, 2009
The Guanchen holeThe Guanches are a stonage culture who lived on the Canary Islands. It is supposed that they were coming from the north of Africa by ship or boats and that they brought all their stock with them, but this theory never has been proofed. The Guanches are probably related to the African Berbers. Some of the words that were passed down through the centuries are related to the Berber language. 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 ...

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Posted by Anna

Comments: 1 Comment so far » Categories: All about Tenerife, Culture, Guanches, History

Dragon tree reputed to be a thousand years old

Monday, April 2nd, 2007
dragon tree tenerife 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 ...

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Posted by Ken

Comments: Leave a Comment » Categories: All about Tenerife, Flowers & Plants, 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 Las Americas, Santa Cruz de Tenerife