The veteran archaeologist María Antonia Perera, possibly the professional who best knows the pre-Hispanic legacy of her native island, has documented more than forty sites, most of them mountains, that were sacred by the majos, the settlers who arrived in Lanzarote from North Africa. during the first centuries of the common era (after Christ). Several of those old volcanoes sacred to the aborigines, as astronomers from the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC) and worldview specialists have certified, 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 stage Oxford International Conferencein which astronomy and astrophysics research 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 topics 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. Very close by, among the lava bubbles from the flows of the Timanfaya eruption that has made Lanzarote world famous, César Manrique built an amazing house, today the headquarters of the foundation that bears the name of the Lanzarote artist.
The two IAC astronomers certified before that reputed audience that the summit of Tahiche was a “seasonal marker”, since during the days close to the equinox –both spring, March 21, and autumn, September 21-, The Sun aligns with an emblematic place of the Zonzamas site: the fortified rock on which the Zonzamas Stele was found, with its solid engraving carved into the rock, as seen in the image published in the first installment of this series.
Tahiche, without a doubt, was a sacred mountain for the indigenous population, but not only because of the equinoctial connection described. In 1973, some chalcedony stones were found hidden “as a ritual deposit,” researchers Perera, Cabrera and Tejera noted in an article, stones that were brought because there is no vein or outcrop in Tahiche. Chalcedony is a gem appreciated in other ancient cultures and is currently an accessory in jewelry and is also used by healers and mystics. But there is more: the so-called idol of Tejía was found on a mountainside.
The historian Miguel Martín González collects in The memory of the sacred (Bilenio 2024) that “the solar sunset, during the winter solstice, is captured in Montaña Mina”, a supposed cosmic event that has not yet been proven by astronomical measurements and that was first exposed by Agustín Pallarés, a self-taught scholar. of archaeoastronomic interpretation.
What there is no doubt is that Montaña Mina was a special place for that society, since there is a funerary site there. “Human remains were found,” the coordinator of the Zonzamas excavation, Marco Moreno, explains to this editorial team, “which appear with many signs of violence.” These vestiges date back to around the 12th century.
The enigma of Guatisea
It was precisely the archaeologist Marco Moreno, co-director of Tibicena Archeology and Heritage, who discovered, in 2003, the enigmatic channels of the Guatisea Mountain – see the cover photo of this report – when the San Bartolomé City Council hired his company to carry out 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 on 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 to channel rainwater. But it was discarded, as anticipated Canary Islands Now in October 2023.
“We have traveled the mountain on days of intense rain and we verified that the water flows everywhere on the slope, it no longer flows 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 carve channels in the volcanic tuff.” What Perera has found is the stone with which the majos carved the mountain to build these unique canals; also the mineral veins from which those lithic tools were extracted, at the top.
Will they have an astronomical purpose? To answer this question, for months, even years, Perera investigated the central mountains of Lanzarote -Guatisea, Mina, Blanca or Tenésara, among others- with the astronomer Juan Antonio Belmonte. “We measured all the mountains on the solstices and equinoxes, but they gave no results.” So? “For us,” Perera explains, “the interpretation that best suits us is the use of sympathetic magic related to rain.” Being an arid island, “it is a kind of call to implore the arrival of rain.”
Miguel Martín González, on the other hand, has found a possible astral relationship as to why they were carved in that place. “From the central part, where the vast majority of the large gutters are located, we have a spectacular stellar set. On the one hand, the Big Dipper rises from the top of the mountain coinciding with the autumn equinox at dawn. And the Little Dipper enters the top of Guatisea, this time at dusk, on the same autumn equinox.” At that 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 only occurs around the twenty-fifth of September.” Given these observations, Martín contextualizes what Nona Perera points out “as sympathetic magic related to rain: it is from the autumn equinox when the first copious rains occur” of the agricultural year in the Canary Islands.
The artificial windows of Guenia
Guenia Mountain treasures another of the mysteries of the archeology of the Island of Volcanoes. Unlike the central mountains, Guenia, located to the northeast, lacks these huge grooves. However, in the rocky perimeter of the crater there are two large windows or doors separated by 246 meters, one in the east and another facing west. Only during the days of the equinoxes does a unique astronomical phenomenon occur: the sunlight enters through the east window, extends towards the other and ends up projecting into a natural cave, on the plain where the old town – it is not indigenous – of Guenia. The author of this observation is Agustín Pallarés Lasso.
The archaeoastronomic proposal of Pallarés has not been studied in depth by professional astronomers, but there is one piece of information that reinforces the hypothesis that Guenia was a sacred mountain for the Guanches of Lanzarote: the windows through which the solar beam penetrates are not natural. The professor of Geology at the ULPGC José Mangas declared to this newspaper: “They do not seem natural”; One fact that leads him to think that they are artificial holes is that “they are cut with a block. The walls are rectilinear,” too straight “to be natural.”
Guenia has archaeological records in its surroundings, mainly rock and ethnographic engravings, but almost as surprising as the windows are the numerous and strange stone structures inside the crater, a site that has never been investigated under institutional sponsorship. Because?
The engravings of Tenésara
Tenesara It is another of the sacred spaces for pre-Hispanic culture. This mountain has two types of engravings. Several panels with gutters and cups similar to those at Guatisea and a rock site, El Castillejo, with 32 panels with alphabetical motifs. 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 carry out the report, a thick fog flooded the Tinajo region. The landscape was ghostly. It prevented us from seeing the top of the mountain; We could only find the canal combs and some cups.
Getting to El Castillejo, at the top of the west face of Tenésara, a privileged viewpoint of the islets of the Chinijo Archipelago, was impossible because the fog did not leave us on October 8. At the time, the panel with the bialphabetic inscriptions was the first to be found in the Canary Islands, as Nona Perera and José Juan Jiménez presented in October 2019, at the XVIII Conference on Studies on Fuerteventura and Lanzarote, the only islands with two types of writing. imported by the indigenous people.
Five years after that forum held in Puerto del Rosario, the capital of Majorca, in which the presentation that also bore the signature of Belmonte was presented, Perera has confirmed Canary Islands Now-elDiario.es that several more panels have 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 Tenésara in search of possible astral connections, but they did not find them. But it doesn’t mean that you don’t find them. The self-taught Pallarés, retired tour guide and son of researcher Agustín Pallarés Padilla, author of the first study on the toponymy of Lanzarote, maintains that there is an equinoctial marker at the top of the mountain, very close to the alphabetical panels. “It is an artificial marker with two large stones,” says Pallarés.
Based on 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, has to stimulate the scientific path traced by those two Canarian researchers who were born on the shores of the Mediterranean.
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