Town of Corrales de Las Hermosas (Pájara, Fuerteventura). “While looking at the Cyclopean monuments, I asked Nona: “Where are the circles?” A little further, he answered me. What do you bet that the Efequenes are right at the point where the summit of El Cardón begins to be seen?” The astronomer Juan Antonio Belmonte remembers the conversation he had with the archaeologist María Antonia Perera the day he visited, for the first time, this ancient site. Erbania either Maxorataan aboriginal name recorded in the chronicles of the second largest island in the Canary Islands. A few years later, on December 17, 2024, the author of this report visited this ancient indigenous settlement – with twenty-four structures including ruined homes and several efequenes – and remembered Belmonte’s words because they made sense: “I started walking and just “The moment I crossed the edge of the efequén of driven stones, I saw the top of Montaña Cardón.”
The efequenes are circles, also called corrals, that dot the Majorera geography. Why do archaeologists relate Efequén to Fuerteventura when on other islands, such as Gran Canaria, there are circles with a certain similarity, although in much smaller numbers and smaller sizes? The answer is simple: the literature of the chronicles after the Conquest only links that term to Fuerteventura. Abreu Galindo says that “on the structures called efequenes or esequenes, which were round, with two stone walls and between wall and wall they had entrances, milk and butter were offered.”
Pedro Gómez Escudero, for his part, also deals with the architecture intended for devotion and records that “they had temples in which they burned food, whose smoke served to decipher the future,” while Tomás Marín y Cubas described, as reflected The Touched Mountains-one of the scientific articles that has served as documentation for this trilogy on the archaeoastronomy and worldview of the Majos- some rites in which they “burned cevada in the sacrifice, and by the straight or tilted smoke they judged the shape of evil or the houses of their dwellings, very small and very stinking of carnage, tallow, rotten meat…” (sic).
Are the efequenes the same? Did these circles have the same function? Do they all have astronomical connections? The answer to these three questions is the same: no. But there are nuances… And there is a lot of research missing on an island with great archaeological potential – probably the second after Gran Canaria – but forgotten by the academic community until recently. In the field work, we have verified geometric differences: some are elliptical, others are almost perfect circles and there is a third typology that combines relatively straight walls with curves that join their sides. There are sites, such as in Las Hermosas, where we find all three types, while in the Cueva Valley -see cover photo-, there are two symmetrical ones but one is circular and the other more rectangular.
There is also construction diversity, since most only have one wall and others, like the Corral de la Assembly, have a double wall (see photos below). There are open ones, with entrances marked by enormous driven stones like Tablero de los Majos, there are also closed ones and, finally, there are a variety of sizes; some exceed 70 meters and others are just over a dozen meters in diameter.
Are these ceremonial structures as cited in the chronicles or do they have other functions? We asked archaeologist Isidoro Hernández, director of the Fuerteventura Archaeological Museum (MAF). “Some are interpreted as corrals for goats, the prawns that we have throughout the island, but there are others of low height, which do not exceed 50 centimeters, like two of the circles that we have seen in Las Hermosas, and they could hardly comply the corral function. An archaeological intervention is necessary to determine the use that these large circles could have.”
We asked the same question to Rosa López, Heritage technician at the Cabildo and co-founder of the archeology company Arenisca. Unlike other professionals in a discipline given to speculation and daydreaming, López is cautious and analytical like her colleague Hernández: “We don’t know what they are.” Probably, “some could be corrals, places related to grazing.” Le Canarien There were more than 40,000 goats on the Island in the 15th century – the century of the Conquest –, a livestock tradition that is maintained today. “There are other circles,” he adds, “that would hardly be corrals because they are very low in height.”
There are other circles, however, in which charred bones have been found; This is the case of an excavation in which Rosa López participated at a site in the center of the Island. The archaeologist clarifies that these structures are not like the sacrificial altars of La Gomera. Consequently, “we cannot rule out different uses.” To investigate the possible use of an efequén, López recalls that “it is important to see what structures they are associated with.” In one of the most emblematic funerary sites on the Island “there are circles of different types” in the surroundings of the tombs. No digging.
Assembly Corral
The largest efequén in Fuerteventura is the Corral de la Assembly, in the north of the Island. It is an enormous ellipsis 75 meters long. Its design is more elaborate than most, since the wall has two rows of driven stones, filled with stones and earth. It is divided into two halves by a road. Some researchers believe that it is a meeting place, hence its name, but it is so large, in the middle of a plain open to the four cardinal points and buffeted by the wind on a regular basis, that they would have to talk out loud. It does not at all resemble a tagoror like those we have seen in Tenerife, Gran Canaria, Lanzarote or El Hierro.
The historian Luis Lorenzo Mata, Heritage inspector for decades in the Island Council, enemy of speculation and faithful to his principle that “many unknowns are resolved with common sense,” considers that this enormous circle “is a tidal wave, like so many that there is in Fuerteventura to store water.” Its thickness and the height of the wall at the bottom tells us about a retaining wall. This structure falls from south to north, precisely following the slope of a nearby hill in which traces of the runoff that would feed the supposed tidal wave are visible. Mata provides two more pieces of information: “The soil, as we see on the outside, is limestone, which makes the base waterproof, while its interior is currently completely filled with earth and sediment.” The director of the MAF, Isidoro Hernández, also considers this hypothesis plausible.
The Tisajoire site, a small town in the middle of a bad country, has a circle of stones, with its interior filled with earth, which some experts, such as archaeologist Rosa López, interpret as a tidal wave. In a tremendously dry territory like Majorero, the use of maretas is essential in agriculture, even today, as it was also in Lanzarote. There is documentary evidence that the maretas are of indigenous origin, as reflected in the island archaeological chart.
IAC astronomer Juan Belmonte has carried out measurements on around thirty esequenes or efequenes. He has hardly found irrefutable astronomical connections, but in some he has certified them. This is not the case of the Corral de la Assembly, although he has observed that it is located “in a very striking place because right where the mountain [ubicada al norte del círculo] It joins the sea and is where the sun rises on the summer solstice.” Belmonte sees another stellar indication: “The valley can be seen perfectly, and the marine area that can be seen is just where all the important stars for the peasantry emerge, such as the constellations of Taurus and Orion, in addition to Aldebaran, the brightest star in Taurus”. While other scholars of Guanche cosmogony would describe this efequén as sacred, these coincidences are not sufficient for the scientific rigor that Belmonte treasures; Consequently, it is not classified as an astronomical site.
In the Corrales de Las Hermosas he did not find astral links either. Despite his sense of smell when he predicted that from the Efequenes you would see the top of the impressive Cardón Mountain massif – at 691 meters high it is the second highest elevation on the Island – and that he considers that “the locations of the circles or other deposits are not free”, in this case “El Castillete – the name of the summit of this mountain – is a topographical reference, not an astronomical one.” All in all, the scientist from the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC) believes that “Corrales de las Hermosas is one of the most spectacular sites in Fuerteventura.”
Majors Board
The efequén in which an astronomical connection has been determined is in Tablero de los Majos, in a remote corner of the Jandía Peninsula, where the natives hardly grazed with their goats. In fact, there is no town or archaeological record associated with this structure. Juan Antonio Belmonte and César Esteban, pioneers of cultural astronomy in Spain, described the landscape surrounding the site as “impressive”: to the west, the wild sea of Cofete and to the east, the peak of La Zarza, the highest altitude in Fuerteventura.
The entrance to the efequén is marked by two driven stones. From the center of the circle, “we find that sunrise occurs, when the solar disk declines + zero degrees 30 minutes, right at the top of the mountain.” This phenomenon occurs “very close to the equinox and coinciding with the average declination of the Sun at the midpoint between both solstices,” the astronomers explain in the scientific article they published to describe their research.
Archaeology, astronomy and research into documentary sources, as we have seen, provide data on the origin and typologies of these stone circles. But they are not the only disciplines to take into account. Philology has studied the origin of the word efequén and relates it “to the Libyan variant fiquen either fikenwith the meaning of temple”, as stated in an article by emeritus professor of the ULL Antonio Tejera Gaspar, Canary Islands Historical Heritage Award.
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