Veteran archaeologist María Antonia Perera, perhaps the professional most knowledgeable about the pre-Hispanic heritage of her native island, has documented more than forty sites, mostly mountains, that were sacred to the majos, the settlers who arrived in Northern Lanzarote Africa during the first centuries of the Common Era (AD). Several of these ancient volcanoes sacred to the aborigines, as certified by astronomers of the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC) and worldview specialists, have astral connections, while in others , there are reasonable indications. The sacred mountains are the protagonists of this report, with which we conclude this trilogy dedicated to the archaeoastronomy of Lanzarote.
The prestigious scene Oxford International Conferencein which research in astronomy and astrophysics is presented after passing a demanding scientific filter, was the first forum in which the equinox was discussed in the pre-Hispanic society of the Canary Islands. One of the themes presented by doctors Esteban and Belmonte, astronomers from the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC), is the astral connection of the Zonzamas site with the Tahiche mountain, a volcanic edifice only 322 meters high . Nearby, among the lava bubbles resulting from the flows of the Timanfaya eruption which made Lanzarote world famous, César Manrique built an astonishing house, today the headquarters of the foundation which bears the name of the artist of Lanzarote.
The two IAC astronomers certified before this renowned audience that the summit of Tahiche was a “seasonal marker”, since during the days close to the equinox – both in spring, March 21, and in autumn, on September 21 – the Sun aligns with an emblematic place. from the Zonzamas site: the fortified rock on which the Zonzamas Stele was found, with its solid engraving cut into the rock, as shown in the image published in the first part of this series.
Tahiche was undoubtedly a sacred mountain for the indigenous population, but not only because of the equinoctial connection described. In 1973, chalcedony stones were discovered hidden “as a ritual deposit,” researchers Perera, Cabrera and Tejera noted in an article, stones that had been brought because there was no vein or outcrop at Tahiche. Chalcedony is a gemstone valued in other ancient cultures and is currently an accessory in jewelry and is also used by healers and mystics. But there’s more: the so-called idol of Tejía was found on the mountainside.
The historian Miguel Martín González brings together in The memory of the sacred (Bilenio 2024) that “the solar sunset, during the winter solstice, is captured in the Montaña Mina”, a supposed cosmic event which has not yet been proven by astronomical measurements and which has been exposed for the first time by Agustín Pallarés, a self-taught scholar. of archaeoastronomical interpretation.
What is beyond doubt is that Montaña Mina was a privileged place for this society, since there is a burial site there. “Human remains have been found,” explains the coordinator of the Zonzamas excavations, Marco Moreno, “which appear with numerous signs of violence.” These remains date back to around the 12th century.
The enigma of Guatisea
It was precisely the archaeologist Marco Moreno, co-director of Archeology and Heritage of Tibicena, who discovered, in 2003, the enigmatic canals of the Guatisea mountain – see the cover photo of this report – when the Town Hall of San Bartolomé hired his company to transport and consult the archaeological map of the municipality. These parallel channels, which exceed ten meters in length and in some cases reach sixteen, are an exclusive rock manifestation of Lanzarote, which is repeated in more mountains of the island.
Archaeologist Nona Perera and geographer Moisés Tejera carried out exhaustive research to decipher the functionality of the gutters and the first hypothesis they proposed was that they were ditches intended to channel rainwater. But it was abandoned, as expected Canary Islands now in October 2023.
“We have walked the mountain on days of intense rain and we have verified that the water is flowing everywhere on the slope, it is no longer flowing through the channels.” This specialist believes that the first settlers of the island “were inspired by the runoff that forms in the mountains when it rains heavily to dig channels in the volcanic tuff”. What Perera found was the stone with which the majos carved the mountain to build these unique canals; also the mineral veins from which these lithic tools were extracted, at the summit.
Will they have an astronomical goal? To answer this question, Perera studied for months, even years, the central mountains of Lanzarote – Guatisea, Mina, Blanca or Tenésara, among others – with the astronomer Juan Antonio Belmonte. “We measured all the mountains at the solstices and equinoxes, but they gave no results.” SO? “For us,” Perera explains, “the interpretation that works best for us is the use of sympathetic magic related to rain.” Being a dry island, “it’s a kind of call to beg for rain.”
Miguel Martín González, for his part, found a possible astral connection as to why they were sculpted in this place. “From the central part, where the vast majority of the large gutters are located, we have a spectacular stellar ensemble. On the one hand, the Big Dipper rises from the top of the mountain, coinciding with the autumnal equinox, at dawn. And the Little Dipper enters the summit of Guatisea, this time at dusk, on the same autumnal equinox. At this precise moment, Martín pointed out to the author of this report, “the alignment of Sirius and Canopus, the two largest stars in the sky, occurs in front of the channels and bowls. This doesn’t happen until around September 25th. Given these observations, Martín contextualizes what Nona Perera highlights “as a sympathetic magic linked to rain: it is from the autumn equinox that the first abundant rains occur” of the agricultural year in the Canary Islands .
The artificial windows of Guénia
Guénia Mountain conceals another of the mysteries of the archeology of the Island of Volcanoes. Unlike the central mountains, Guénia, located in the northeast, is devoid of these immense grooves. However, within the rocky perimeter of the crater are two large windows or doorways 246 meters apart, one to the east and another facing west. It is only during the equinox days that a unique astronomical phenomenon occurs: sunlight enters through the eastern window, extends towards the other and ends up projecting itself into a natural cave, in the plain where the old town is located – it is not indigenous – of Guenia. . The author of this observation is Agustín Pallarés Lasso.
Pallarés’ archaeoastronomical proposal has not been studied in depth by professional astronomers, but there is information that reinforces the hypothesis that Guenia was a sacred mountain for the Guanches of Lanzarote: the windows through which the solar ray penetrates do not are not natural. Professor of Geology at ULPGC José Mangas told this newspaper: “They don’t seem natural”; A fact that leads him to believe that these are artificial holes is that “they are dug with a block. The walls are rectilinear, “too straight” to be natural.
Guenia has archaeological records in its surroundings, mainly rock and ethnographic carvings, but almost as surprising as the windows are the many strange stone structures inside the crater, a site which has never been the subject of research under institutional patronage. Because?
The engravings of Tenesara
Tenesara It is another of the sacred spaces of pre-Hispanic culture. This mountain has two types of engravings. Several panels with gutters and cups similar to those at Guatisea and a rocky site, El Castillejo, with 32 panels with alphabetical patterns. Among them, there is a bialphabetic one, with Libyan-Berber and Libyan-Latin characters. The morning we visited this enclave on the west coast of the island to produce the report, a thick fog flooded the Tinajo region. The landscape was ghostly. This prevented us from seeing the top of the mountain; We were only able to find the channel combs and a few cuts.
Arriving at El Castillejo, at the top of the west face of Tenésara, a privileged viewpoint over the islets of the Chinijo archipelago, was impossible because the fog did not leave us on October 8. At the time, the panel with bialphabetical inscriptions was the first found in the Canary Islands, as Nona Perera and José Juan Jiménez presented it in October 2019, during the XVIII Study Conference on Fuerteventura and Lanzarote, the only islands with have two types. writing imported by indigenous peoples.
Five years after this forum held in Puerto del Rosario, the capital of Mallorca, during which the presentation was presented that also bore the signature of Belmonte, Perera confirmed Canary Islands Now-elDiario.es that several other signs appeared with the combination of letters of Libyan and Latin origin, both in Lanzarote and Fuerteventura.
Nona Perera and Juan Belmonte carried out mediations in Tenesara looking for possible astral connections, but they did not find them. But that doesn’t mean you can’t find them. The self-taught Pallarés, retired tourist guide and son of researcher Agustín Pallarés Padilla, author of the first study on the toponymy of Lanzarote, affirms that there is an equinoctial marker at the top of the mountain, very close to the alphabetical signs. “It’s an artificial marker with two big stones,” Pallarés explains.
From what we have seen and told in this trilogy, archaeological research must continue. The Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands, where the two pioneers of cultural astronomy in Spain (Belmonte and Esteban) were trained, must stimulate the scientific path traced by these two Canarian researchers born on the shores of the Mediterranean.
