Guanches

Population: Extinct as a distinct community after the conquest; substantial genetic and cultural inheritance in the modern Canarian population

Location: All seven main islands, with Tenerife's menceyatos the last to fall

Language: Guanche, a group of Amazigh (Berber) varieties, extinct by the seventeenth century and known from word lists, place names and inscriptions

Language family: Afro-Asiatic → Berber

Traditional governance: Tenerife divided among nine menceyatos under a mencey each; Gran Canaria under guanartemes with a council of nobles and a religious figure, the faycán; other islands with their own arrangements.

Most African peoples are federations of named sub-groups — clans, sections, chiefdoms or sub-tribes — each with its own dialect, territory and traditions.

Clothing: Tamarcos of goat and sheep hide, sewn with bone needles and fish-bone thread; plaited rush footwear; body painting with pintaderas, the fired clay seals found across the islands.

Food: Gofio, roasted grain flour still eaten daily in the Canaries; goat meat and milk, cheese, fish and shellfish, figs and mocán fruit; no metal cooking vessels, so food was prepared with hot stones and pottery.

Ceremonies: Beñesmen, the harvest festival; rain-making appeals at mountain sites; funerary mummification with tanning and drying of the body; the tagoror council assemblies held in stone circles.

Marriage customs: Practices differed by island; accounts describe both monogamy and, on some islands, polyandry, though colonial sources on this are unreliable and hostile.

Initiation rites: Young men trained in the stick fighting and stone throwing that made Guanche resistance formidable; the salto del pastor, leaping down ravines on a long pole, remains a Canarian sport.

“The mountain is the last mencey.”

Terrain outlasts rulers; a modern Canarian formulation.

“Gofio feeds where nothing grows.”

Roasted grain flour as the survival food of a dry archipelago.

“A whistle crosses what a shout cannot.”

The practical logic of Silbo.

Creation: Belief in a supreme god — Achamán on Tenerife, Acorán on Gran Canaria — creator of the world and of the first people; the peak of Teide was associated with the malign figure Guayota, held to be confined within it.

Beliefs: A high creator god; Magec the sun; Guayota the evil power of the volcano; Chaxiraxi the mother goddess of Tenerife, later assimilated to the Virgin of Candelaria; harimaguadas, women religious specialists on Gran Canaria.

Ancestors: The dead were mummified and placed in burial caves with grave goods; ancestral caves were protected sites, and their looting after the conquest destroyed much of the archaeological record.

Traditional settlements: Natural and excavated cave dwellings, notably at Cenobio de Valerón and the Cuatro Puertas complex; stone-walled houses on Gran Canaria at Cueva Pintada and La Fortaleza.

Building techniques: Cave excavation in volcanic tuff; dry-stone construction; communal grain silos cut into cliff faces with hundreds of chambers; painted geometric decoration at Cueva Pintada.

Village layout: Settlement around water and pasture, granary silos on defensible cliffs, tagoror council circles of set stones, burial caves apart from the living.

1. c. 1000 BCE–100 CE

   Amazigh populations reach the archipelago from North Africa.

2. 1402

   Castilian conquest begins with Lanzarote under Jean de Béthencourt.

3. 1483

   Gran Canaria falls after long resistance.

4. 1494–1496

   Guanche victory at Acentejo, then defeat; Tenerife is taken and the conquest completed.

5. 1600s

   The Guanche language dies out; Silbo transfers to Spanish on La Gomera.