The aboriginal people of Lanzarote, first of the islands to be raided and first to be conquered, whose name survives in the goatskin shoes they wore, and whose descendants farmed a landscape that was then buried by six years of eruptions.
Population: Extinct as a distinct people; ancestry present in the modern population
Location: Lanzarote, with related Mahos on Fuerteventura
Language: An extinct Amazigh language, known from place names and a few recorded terms
Language family: Afro-Asiatic → Berber (Amazigh)
Traditional governance: A single kingdom on Lanzarote under a chief, with the island's small size and scarce water making central control practicable; Fuerteventura was divided in two.
Most African peoples are federations of named sub-groups (clans, sections, chiefdoms or sub-tribes), each with its own dialect, territory and traditions.
Lanzarote Majos
The island's own population, centred on Zonzamas and the interior.
Fuerteventura Mahos
The related population of the neighbouring island, divided between two kingdoms.
Post-conquest survivors
Those baptised and absorbed after 1402, whose descendants remained on the land.
Clothing: The maho, a goatskin shoe that gave the people their name; goatskin cloaks; body painting and ornament of shell and bone.
Food: Gofio of roasted barley, goat meat and milk, fish and shellfish from a coast with no permanent streams behind it.
Ceremonies: Rain observances in an island with almost no surface water; funerary rites with burial in stone structures; assemblies at the chief's seat.
Marriage customs: Accounts describe practices Castilian chroniclers found remarkable and recorded unreliably; property and rank appear to have passed through women in part.
Initiation rites: Not recorded in usable detail; the chronicles are the work of the conquerors and are thin on anything not military or economic.
Every dish the Atlas publishes for Canary Islands, at national rather than community level — 6 in all: the staple a household eats daily, the dish the country names as its own, street food, what is cooked for a wedding or Eid, regional specialities and a drink. Quantities and method are given for every one, so these are recipes rather than descriptions, and each has a photograph from Wikimedia Commons. The Food page carries the whole continent, searchable by country and by ingredient.
Small potatoes boiled in heavily salted water until the skins wrinkle and crust with salt, served with mojo sauces. Made originally with seawater, and still the first thing put on any Canarian table.
Serves 4 · 40 minutes
Salt fish poached with potatoes and sweet potato, served with gofio kneaded into a ball. Eaten at Easter and on saints' days, and the closest thing the islands have to a national dish.
Serves 6 · 1 hour, plus 24 hours soaking
Small marinated pork skewers grilled over charcoal, sold at every romería and fiesta in the islands. The name means Moorish skewers, from a Spanish dish that reached the Canaries and stayed.
Serves Makes 12 skewers · 30 minutes, plus 4 hours marinating
Shredded beef and chicken fried with chickpeas and potato, built from the meat left over after making broth. The name means old clothes, for the rags the meat falls into.
Serves 6 · 2 hours 30 minutes
Toasted grain flour scalded with hot fish broth into a smooth paste, eaten with a raw onion to scoop it. Gofio is the direct inheritance of the aboriginal Canarians and is still eaten daily.
Serves 4 · 20 minutes
A layered coffee of condensed milk, liqueur, espresso and foamed milk, finished with lemon peel and cinnamon. Ordered by the thousand in Tenerife and served in a glass so the layers show.
Serves 1 · 5 minutes
The First to Be TakenHistorical account
Lanzarote had been raided for slaves for a century before the conquest proper. When Jean de Béthencourt landed in 1402 the population had already been reduced by raiding, and the island fell quickly. It became the base from which the rest of the archipelago was attacked over the following ninety years, and the model for what Castile would do in the Americas.
Buried Under TimanfayaEnvironmental account
Between 1730 and 1736 eruptions covered a quarter of Lanzarote in lava and ash, destroying a dozen villages and the island's best farmland. What followed was one of the more extraordinary agricultural adaptations anywhere: farmers dug pits through the ash, planted vines in the volcanic gravel and built low stone crescents against the wind, producing wine from ground that had swallowed the old fields.
“The island has no river and has never been thirsty.”
Dew, ash and cisterns in place of streams.
“Ash keeps water the soil lost.”
The enarenado technique, in one line.
“The first door forced opens all the rest.”
Lanzarote as the base for the conquest.
Creation: A sky-associated supreme being shared in form with the other islands; sacred sites at particular peaks and stone structures.
Beliefs: A high god addressed at open-air sites; ritual structures such as the Quesera de Zonzamas, cut with parallel channels whose purpose is disputed; ancestral burial in stone.
Ancestors: Stone burial structures survive across the island; genealogies did not, the conquest having preceded any local written record.
The supreme being
A sky god of the form found across the archipelago, name uncertain for Lanzarote
The queseras
Rock-cut structures with parallel grooves, understood as ritual though their use is argued over
Ancestors
Buried in stone tumuli and cavities, honoured at the settlement
Traditional settlements: Dry-stone villages, the best preserved at Zonzamas and Ajei; cave use where lava tubes allowed; later Canarian villages built over aboriginal sites.
Building techniques: Dry-stone construction without mortar; use of lava tubes and volcanic cavities; after 1736, the enarenado method of planting through volcanic ash and the semicircular zoco walls.
Village layout: Settlements near the scarce water sources and on defensible rises, with the chief's seat at Zonzamas the island's political centre.
Zonzamas settlement
Heritage site
The seat of Lanzarote's aboriginal kingdom, of dry-stone construction.
Quesera de Zonzamas
Ritual
A rock cut with parallel channels, of contested ritual purpose.
The maho shoe
Dress
The goatskin footwear that gave the people their name.
La Geria vine pits
Agriculture
Post-eruption planting hollows with crescent windbreaks, a landscape unlike any other.
c. 500 BCE–200 CE
Amazigh settlement of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura from North Africa.
1300s
European slave raiding reduces the population before any conquest is attempted.
1402
Jean de Béthencourt lands; Lanzarote becomes the first island taken and the base for the rest.
1730–1736
The Timanfaya eruptions bury a quarter of the island and its best farmland.
1993
Lanzarote is designated a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, largely for the landscape built on the ash.
Open sources
Premium & scholarly sources