History of Tenerife

Tenerife was the last of the large islands to be incorporated into the Crown of Castile, and its conquest proved the longest and most complex in the archipelago. Before 1494, the island was inhabited by Guanche societies of North African origin, linked to the Berber or Amazigh world, who had developed a pastoral culture adapted to the mountains, wind and sea. Their presence shaped the island's human landscape for centuries.

The political organisation was divided into nine menceyatos —Anaga, Tegueste, Tacoronte, Taoro, Icod, Daute, Adeje, Abona and Güímar— each ruled by a mencey who exercised power from a tagoror, a place of audience and council. Guanche society was sharply stratified: the noble achimencey, an intermediate group called cichiciquitzo, and the peasant and herder achicaxna.

The economy was based on goat and sheep herding, barley and wheat cultivation, palm-honey gathering and coastal fishing. The Guanches practised mummification of their dead, leaving embalmed bodies that still allow study of their bioanthropology, and developed a belief system centred on figures such as Achguayaxerax. The chronicles also record an illness the Guanches themselves called modorra, which when it struck claimed as many victims as an epidemic.

The Virgin of Candelaria occupied a central place in the island's religious memory. According to chronicles, an image of the Virgin appeared on a southern beach before the conquest, and devotion to her spread until Candelaria became a pilgrimage centre for the whole Canary archipelago. The Dominican friar Alonso de Espinosa gathered that tradition in his Historia de Nuestra Señora de Candelaria.

Alonso Fernández de Lugo's first expedition landed in 1494 in the area of Añazo, present-day Santa Cruz de Tenerife, where he built a small fort. The southern menceyatos, evangelised some time earlier by missionaries, remained neutral and formed the so-called bands of peace, while those of the north, led by Taoro, chose to fight as bands of war. When Lugo advanced inland, Bencomo's Guanches ambushed him in the Acentejo ravine: the Castilian troops were defeated and Lugo himself nearly lost his life. That place is known today as La Matanza de Acentejo.

Between 1494 and 1496 Lugo organised a second campaign with a larger and better-armed force, reinforced from Gran Canaria and La Gomera, and rebuilt the fort at Añazo. On the plains of Aguere, next to present-day La Laguna, the Guanches were defeated and the mencey Bencomo lost his life in battle. The epidemics that decimated the indigenous population weakened the resistance, which suffered a final defeat in the Acentejo district, between the present-day towns of La Matanza and La Victoria. In the spring of 1496, with the surrender of Anaga, the island was incorporated into Castile; in Los Realejos, the Mirador del Lance today commemorates the mencey Bentor with a sculpture.

The conquest and colonisation dismantled the Guanche world. Many indigenous people were sold as slaves before, during and after the war, and the documents record captives from each of the island's nine bands. Orders of liberation, such as the one promoted in 1477 by bishop Juan de Frías, and the constant complaints of free Guanches demanding the freedom of their countrymen achieved some manumissions, although slavery and servitude persisted. The survivors underwent a harsh process of acculturation, though some groups kept alive the awareness of their own identity.

Founded in 1496, San Cristóbal de La Laguna became Tenerife's first colonial capital and the first planned urban layout without walls in the Atlantic sphere. From there the new island administration, evangelisation and distribution of lands among the conquerors were organised.

During the 16th and 17th centuries the economy revolved around sugar, wine and cochineal dyes. Malvasia wines brought Tenerife international fame: after the peace with England, English merchants formed a company with a royal privilege that sent agents to the island to buy the best wines and resell them in London at enormous profit. The town council of La Laguna went so far as to expel the English factors, and squads of masked men raided the cellars by night to spill the wine destined for the company. In the 19th century bananas became the export crop par excellence, while the port of Santa Cruz grew as the main commercial hub between Europe, Africa and America.

In July 1797, at the height of the war with England, Rear-Admiral Horatio Nelson attacked Santa Cruz de Tenerife with a division of nine ships and two thousand landing troops, drawn by the cargo of a frigate arrived from Manila. The town, defended by general Gutiérrez with veteran troops and island militias, repulsed the assault: as he came alongside the mole, a cannonball shattered Nelson's right arm, and the British columns, surrounded in the convent of Santo Domingo, capitulated on 25 July and re-embarked.

In the 18th century the Enlightenment turned La Laguna into a literary and scientific hub: its salons shaped the historian José de Viera y Clavijo, and for decades the people of Tenerife demanded a university with chairs of theology, jurisprudence and medicine. The effort crystallised in the University of San Fernando, created in 1817 and considered the first centre of higher studies in Tenerife. On his way to America, the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt landed on the island and judged the Orotava valley one of the most beautiful places on earth; in 1803, Santa Cruz installed its first town council.

The growth of Santa Cruz's port during the 18th and 19th centuries shifted the island's administrative axis. In 1833 Santa Cruz became provincial capital, although La Laguna retained institutional weight through the university and bishopric. In the 20th century, the creation of the island cabildos and the division of the archipelago into two provinces reordered political life, while emigration —which in the post-war years reached the scale of a true diaspora towards Venezuela— and the later tourist boom transformed the island's economy and society. Today Tenerife combines its Guanche memory, religious tradition and position as the political and tourist centre of the archipelago.