Holidays in Canary Islands are great ideas. The Canary Islands is a great place to stay or live on a holiday, it has a amazing history, I am interesdted in it, and I did not realise it had such a history, it's like a new country been discovere,d I mean the Guanches, I suppose they were treated like the Irish in a way, or even worse, yes maybe worse. But there were more Irish people, and their oppression was nearer to our time. But the Guanches history was like that of some amazing story. The Spanish kinfgs were terrible fgor leading these oppressions, but look at the holiday idea in Cnaary Islands loads of isles synonomus with holidays and vacations, whata a place to holiday in, like whata great place to see, I think I might go there as the place seems njust so cool, and tremendous. Canary Islands what a place and what a a amazing history to see see the sites, the lifestyle, wildlife, people, women, ladies, humanms, and other livinmg things living yeah.
The Canary Islands have been known
since antiquity; the islands themselves are estimated to be 30 million years old.
The Canaries were populated by an indigenous population called the Guanches, whose
origin is still the subject of discussion among historians and linguists.
The origins of the Canarian indigenous people are still the subject of debate. Numerous theories have been put forward, achieving varying degrees of acceptance.
Archaeology suggests that the original settlers arrived by sea, importing domestic animals such as goats, sheep, pigs and dogs and cereals such as wheat, barley and lentils. They also brought with them a set of well-defined socio-cultural practices that seem to have originated and been in use for a long period of time elsewhere.
There is evidence to prove that various Mediterranean civilisations in antiquity knew of the islands' existence and established contact with them. The islands were visited by the Phoenicians, the Greeks and the Carthaginians. According to Pliny the Elder, the 1st century AD Roman author and philosopher, an expedition of Mauritanians sent by Juba II to the archipelago visited the islands, finding them to be uninhabited, but that there were ruins of great buildings. When King Juba, the Roman protegee, dispatched a contingent to re-open the dye production facility at Mogador (historical name of Essaouira, Morocco) in the early 1st century AD, Juba's naval force was subsequently sent on an exploration of the Canary Islands, using Mogador as their mission base.
In the Middle Ages the islands were visited by Arab and European sailors. The indigenous population of the Canaries, therefore, did not develop in complete isolation.
Today, archaeological and ethnographic studies have led most scholars to accept the view that the pre-colonial population of the Canaries shared common origins with North African Berber tribes from the Atlas Mountains region who began to arrive in the Canaries by sea around 1000 BCE or earlier. However, there is no archaeological or historical evidence to prove that either the Berber tribes of the Atlas Mountains or the Canarian pre-colonial population had knowledge or made use of navigation techniques. The peak of Tenerife is visible from the African coast on the very clearest of days, but the currents around the islands tend to lead the boats southwest and west, past the archipelago and into the Atlantic Ocean.
Most scholars would now agree that the earliest reliable dates related to permanent human occupation can be traced back to about 1000 BCE, but different absolute dating technologies such as 14C and thermoluminescence have provided variable results. Inadequate methodologies and an insufficient number of absolute datings carried out throughout the archipelago have yielded inconsistencies and information gaps.
There still exists however a variety of theories regarding the origins of pre-colonial Canarians explaining them by the hypothesis of a more recent immigration. Some scholars (mainly from the University of La Laguna, in Tenerife) defend the theory that the Canarian populations are Punic-Phoenician in origin. Professor D. Juan Álvarez Delgado, on the other hand, argued that the Canaries were uninhabited until 100 BCE, when they were gradually discovered by Greek and Roman sailors. In the second half of the first century BCE, King Juba II of Numidia abandoned North African prisoners on the islands, who eventually became the prehispanic Canarians. The fact that the first inhabitants were abandoned prisoners thus explains, according to Álvarez Delgado, their lack of navigational acumen.
Although denied by certain scholars (cf. Abreu Galindo 1977: 297), specialisation of labour and a hierarchy system seem to have governed the social structures of the Canarian precolonial populations. In Tenerife the highest figure was known as the Mencey, although, by the time the first Spanish incursions in the Canaries took place, Tenerife had already been divided into nine menceyatos (i.e. separate regions of the island controlled by its own Mencey), namely Anaga, Tegueste, Tacoronte, Taoro, Icod, Daute, Adeje, Abona and Güimar. Despite the fact that all Menceys were independent and absolute owners of their territory within the island, it was the Mencey of Taoro who acted, according to the chronicles, as primus inter pares. Gran Canaria, on the other hand, appears to have been divided into two guanartematos (i.e. functionally, politically and structurally differentiated regions): Telde and Gáldar, each governed by a Guanarteme.
Studies of precolonial Canarian society illustrate both agricultural and pastoral ways of life in the Canaries (cf. Diego Cuscoy 1963: 44; González Antón & Tejera Gaspar 1990: 78).
At the time of European engagement, the Canary Islands were inhabited by a variety of indigenous communities. The pre-colonial population of the Canaries is generically referred to as Guanches, although, strictly speaking, Guanches were originally the inhabitants of Tenerife. According to the chronicles, the inhabitants of Fuerteventura and Lanzarote were referred to as Maxos, Gran Canaria was inhabited by the Canarians, El Hierro by the Bimbaches, La Palma by the Auaritas and La Gomera by the Gomeros. Evidence does seem to suggest that inter-insular interaction was relatively low and each island was populated by its own distinct socio-cultural groups who lived in relative isolation.
Little information has survived regarding the religious and cosmological beliefs of the Guanches. Indigenous Canarian people often performed their religious practices in places marked by particular striking geographical features or types of vegetation. Certain sites containing architectonic remains and cave paintings have been identified as sanctuaries.
Population Genetics
A 2003 genetics research article by Nicole Maca-Meyer et al. published in the European Journal of Human Genetics compared aboriginal Guanche mtDNA (collected from Canarian archaeological sites) to that of today's Canarians and concluded that, "despite the continuous changes suffered by the population (Spanish colonisation, slave trade), aboriginal mtDNA [direct maternal] lineages constitute a considerable proportion [42 – 73%] of the Canarian gene pool. Although the Berbers are the most probable ancestors of the Guanches, it is deduced that important human movements [e.g., the Islamic-Arabic conquest of the Berbers] have reshaped Northwest Africa after the migratory wave to the Canary Islands" and the "results support, from a maternal perspective, the supposition that since the end of the 16th century, at least, two-thirds of the Canarian population had an indigenous substrate, as was previously inferred from historical and anthropological data." mtDNA haplogroup U subclade U6b1 is Canarian-specific and is the most common mtDNA haplogroup found in aboriginal Guanche archaeological burial sites.
Y-DNA, or Y-chromosomal, (direct paternal) lineages were not analyzed in this study. However, an earlier study giving the aboriginal y-DNA contribution at 6% was cited by Maca-Meyer et al. but the results were critiqued as possibly flawed due to the widespread phylogeography of y-DNA haplogroup E1b1b1b, which may skew determination of the aboriginality versus coloniality of contemporary y-DNA lineages in the Canaries. Regardless, Maca-Meyer et al. states that historical evidence does support the explanation of "strong sexual asymmetry...as a result of a strong bias favouring matings between European males and aboriginal females, and to the important aboriginal male mortality during the Conquest.
Links in ancient times
The peak of Teide on Tenerife can be seen on clear days from the African coast. It is possible that the islands were among those visited by the Carthaginian captain Hanno the Navigator in his voyage of exploration along the African coast. The islands may have been visited by the Phoenicians seeking the precious red dye extracted from the orchilla, if the Canaries represent The Purple Isles of legend or the Hesperides. Although there is no evidence that Romans established permanent settlements, in 1964 Roman amphorae were discovered in waters off Lanzarote. Discoveries made in the 1990s have demonstrated in more secure detail that the Romans traded with the indigenous inhabitants. Excavations of a settlement at El Bebedero on Lanzarote, made by a team under Pablo Atoche Peña of the Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and Juan Ángel Paz Peralta of the Universidad de Zaragoza, yielded about a hundred Roman potsherds, nine pieces of metal, and one piece of glass at the site, in strata dated between the first and fourth centuries A.D. Analysis of the clay indicated origins in Campania, Hispania Baetica and the province of Africa (modern Tunisia).
European traditions that refer to islands in the Western Ocean (the Atlantic) are often linked with the Canaries.
Middle Ages
During the Middle Ages, the islands were visited by the Arabs for commercial purposes. Muslim navigator Ibn Farrukh, from Granada, is said to have landed in "Gando" (Gran Canaria) in February 999, visiting a king named Guanarigato. From the 14th century onward, numerous visits were made by sailors from Mallorca, Portugal, and Genoa. Lancelotto Malocello settled on the island of Lanzarote in 1312. The Mayorcans established a mission with a bishop in the islands that lasted from 1350 to 1400. It is from this mission that the various paintings and statues of the Virgin Mary that are currently venerated in the island were preserved. European disembarkations of Genovese, Castilian and Portuguese missionaries and pirates on Canarian shores became relatively common and the prehispanic populations were subjected to a long, continuous process of Westernisation before the colonisations.
The islands were known to the Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans, and are mentioned in a number of classical sources. For example, Pliny the Elder describes a Carthaginian expedition to the Canaries, and they may have been the Fortunate Isles of other classical writers. King Juba, the Roman protegee, dispatched a contingent to re-open the dye production facility at Mogador in the early 1st century AD. That same naval force was subsequently sent on an exploration of the Canary Islands, using Mogador as their mission base.
When the Europeans began to explore the islands
they encountered several indigenous populations living at a Neolithic level of
technology. Although the history of the settlement of the Canary Islands is still
unclear, linguistic and genetic analyses seem to indicate that at least some of
these inhabitants shared a common origin with the Berbers of northern Africa.
The pre-colonial inhabitants came to be known collectively as the Guanches, although
Guanches was originally the name for the indigenous inhabitants of Tenerife.
Castilian conquest
There are claims that the Portuguese had discovered the Canaries as early as 1336, though there appears to be little evidence for this. In 1402, the Castilian conquest of the islands began, with the expedition of Jean de Béthencourt and Gadifer de la Salle, nobles and vassals of Henry III of Castile, to the island of Lanzarote. From there, they conquered Fuerteventura and El Hierro. Béthencourt received the title King of the Canary Islands, but still recognized King Henry III as his overlord. A terrible act for locals as many would die of the Royal oppression,
Béthencourt also established a base on the island of La Gomera, but it would be many years before the island was truly conquered. The natives of La Gomera, and of Gran Canaria, Tenerife, and La Palma, resisted the Castilian invaders for almost a century. In 1448 Maciot de Béthencourt sold the lordship of Lanzarote to Portugal's Prince Henry the Navigator, an action that was not accepted by the natives nor by the Castilians. A crisis swelled to a revolt which lasted until 1459 with the final expulsion of the Portuguese. Finally, in 1479, Portugal recognised Castilian control of the Canary Islands in the Treaty of Alcaçovas.
The Castilians continued to dominate the islands, but due to the topography and the resistance of the native Guanches, complete pacification was not achieved until 1495, when Tenerife and La Palma were finally subdued by Alonso Fernández de Lugo. After that, the Canaries were incorporated into the Kingdom of Castile.
Long term historical
significance
The Canary Islands would prove a stepping stone towards "The New World" - and not only in the geographical sense. In retrospect, their conquest and colonization can be seen as a "dress rehearsal" in which the Castilians practised what they (and later, other Europeans emulating them) would practice on an immensely larger scale throughout the Americas and other continents. The Guanches has the misfortune to be the first of countless extra-European indigenous populations to have their land invaded, their most persistent and prolonged opposition eventually crushed, and their populations decimated but never were completely exterminated.
In the specific Spanish context, the conquest of the Canary Islands provided the transition between the Reconquista, carried out under the claim of recovering territory which had been conquered by Muslims, to the work of the Conquistadors, in which land was conquered without any claim of prior possession, solely on the basis of the doctrine that Christians were entitled to conquer the land of "pagans" or "infidels" (a doctrine later secularized into asserting the right of "civilized" people to conquer "savages" and "primitives").
After the conquest
After the conquest, the Castilians imposed a new economic model, based on single-crop cultivation: first sugar cane; then wine, an important item of trade with England. In this era, the first institutions of colonial government were founded. Both Gran Canaria, since 6 March 1480 a colony of Castile (from 1556 of Spain), and Tenerife, a Spanish colony since 1495, had separate governors.
The cities of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and Santa Cruz de Tenerife became a stopping point for the Spanish conquerors, traders, and missionaries on their way to the New World. This trade route brought great prosperity to some of the social sectors of the islands. The islands became quite wealthy and soon were attracting merchants and adventurers from all over Europe. Magnificent palaces and churches were built on the island of La Palma during this busy, prosperous period. The Church of El Salvador survives as one of the island's finest examples of the architecture of the 1500s.
The Canaries' wealth invited attacks by pirates and privateers. Ottoman Turkish admiral and privateer Kemal Reis ventured into the Canaries in 1501, while Murat Reis the Elder captured Lanzarote in 1585.
The most severe attack took place in 1599, during the Dutch War of Independence. A Dutch fleet of 74 ships and 12,000 men, commanded by Johan Van der Does, attacked the capital, Las Palmas (the city had 3,500 of Gran Canaria's 8,545 inhabitants). The Dutch attacked the Castillo de la Luz, which guarded the harbor. The Canarians evacuated civilians from the city, and the Castillo surrendered (but not the city). The Dutch moved inland, but Canarian cavalry drove them back to Tamaraceite, near the city.
The Dutch then laid siege to the city, demanding the surrender of all its wealth. They received 12 sheep and 3 calves. Furious, the Dutch sent 4,000 soldiers to attack the Council of the Canaries, who were sheltering in the village of Santa Brígida. 300 Canarian soldiers ambushed the Dutch in the village of Monte Lentiscal, killing 150 and forcing the rest to retreat. The Dutch concentrated on Las Palmas, attempting to burn it down. The Dutch pillaged Maspalomas, on the southern coast of Gran Canaria, San Sebastian on La Gomera, and Santa Cruz on La Palma, but eventually gave up the siege of Las Palmas and withdrew.
Another noteworthy attack occurred in 1797, when Santa Cruz de Tenerife was attacked by a British fleet under the future Lord Nelson on 25 July. The British were repulsed, losing almost 400 men. It was during this battle that Nelson lost his right arm.
Eighteenth to nineteenth centuries
The sugar-based economy of the islands faced stiff competition from Spain's American colonies. Crises in the sugar market in the nineteenth century caused severe recessions on the islands. A new cash crop, cochineal (cochinilla), came into cultivation during this time, saving the islands' economy.
These economic difficulties spurred mass emigration, primarily to the Americas, during the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. From 1840 to 1890, as many as 40,000 Canary Islanders emigrated to Venezuela. Also, thousands of Canarians moved to Puerto Rico, the Spanish monarchy felt that Canarians would adapt to island life better than other immigrants from the mainland of Spain. Deeply entrenched traditions such as the Mascaras Festival in the town of Hatillo, Puerto Rico are an example of Canarian culture still preserved in Puerto Rico. Similarly, many thousands of Canarians emigrated to the shores of Cuba as well. During the Spanish-American War of 1898, the Spanish fortified the islands against possible American attack; but the attack never came.
Early twentieth century
At the beginning of the 20th century, the British introduced a new cash-crop, the banana, the export of which was controlled by companies such as Fyffes.
The rivalry between the elites of the cities of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and Santa Cruz de Tenerife for the capital of the islands led to the division of the archipelago into two provinces in 1927. This has not laid to rest the rivalry between the two cities, which continues to this day.
During the time of the Second Spanish Republic, Marxist and anarchist workers' movements began to develop, led by figures such as Jose Miguel Perez and Guillermo Ascanio. However, outside of a few municipalities, these organizations were a minority and fell easily to Nationalist forces during the Spanish Civil War.
Franco regime
In 1936, Francisco Franco was appointed General Commandant of the Canaries. He joined the military revolt of July 17 which began the Spanish Civil War. Franco quickly took control of the archipelago, except for a few points of resistance on the island of La Palma and in the town of Vallehermoso, on La Gomera . Though there was never a proper war in the islands, the post-war repression on the Canaries was most severe.
During the Second World War, Winston Churchill prepared plans for the British seizure of the Canary Islands as a naval base, in the event of Gibraltar being invaded from the Spanish mainland.
Opposition
to Franco's regime did not begin to organize until the late 1950s, which experienced
an upheaval of parties such as the Communist Party of Spain and the formation
of various nationalist, leftist parties. Mnay died of Franco;s oppression and
of famines under Franco, and emmigration boats drowning, when fleeing the Canaries
to other lands.
Today
After the death of Franco, there was a pro-independence armed movement based in Algeria, the MPAIAC. Now there are some pro-independence political parties, like the CNC and the Popular Front of the Canary Islands, but none of them calls for an armed struggle. Their popular support is insignificant, with no presence in both the autonomous parliament and the cabildos insulares.
After the establishment of a democratic constitutional monarchy in Spain, autonomy was granted to the Canaries via a law passed in 1982. In 1983, the first autonomous elections were held. The Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) won. In the most recent autonomous elections (2007), the PSOE gained a plurality of seats, but the nationalist Canarian Coalition and the conservative Partido Popular (PP) formed a ruling coalition government.
Find a Villa from Across Europe
Grand World Villas - Find a Villa from anywhere in the world
Grand Global Villas - Find Villas from Around the Globe
An Index with links to almost all our sites.
The History Lounge - A place with 100s of Historical articles.
Holidays to the Maldives + History of the Maldives
Holidays
to Tunisia + History of Tunisia
Lanzarote
Holidays + History of Lanzarote
Dubai Holidays + History of Dubai
Holidays to Greece + History of Greece
Holidays in Egypt - History of Egypt
Holidays Turkey - History of Turkey
Holidays
in Italy + History of Italy
Holidays
Cyprus + History of Cyprus
Holidays
in Tenerife + History of Tenerife
Holiday
to - Great places to go on Holiday to
Holiday
to 2 - More Great places to go on Holiday to
Holiday
to 3 - More places to go on Holiday to
Even More Holidays and Vacations
Vacations
-More Vacation Locations
Find some Cottages in Britain or Ireland and the world
A site stating what have been the world's largest empires ever
Find a Cottage in Britain or Ireland
Find more Cottages in Britain, Ireland, the USA, Canada or the world
Holidays Canary Islands + History of Canary Islands Holidays in the Canary Islands + Hisstory of the Canary Islands Holidays in teh Canary Islands + History of teh Canary Islands Holidays inn Canary Islands + History of Canary Islands Holidays in Canary Island + History of the Canary Isles
Cottages in Spain and Holiday Homes
More pages on Financial Affairs
Banks - A page on Financial Affairs