The Mysterious Pyramids of Güímar

For many people Tenerife is a place where pasty-skinned Europeans go to roast themselves in the sunshine and drink themselves silly in the plethora of bars that line the costas. Indeed, some 5 million tourists visit the island every year and the vast majority of these head straight to the barren south-west coast, packing tightly into purpose-built high-rise resorts like Los Cristianos and Playa de las Américas.

But beyond the beaches and the sunbeds Tenerife is stunningly beautiful. The largest and most populous of the Canary Islands, it’s essentially one massive volcano and the landscape is appropriately diverse – high ridges and deep valleys plunge dramatically into the sea and lush sweet-smelling pine forests cloak the twisting approaches to Mount Teide, at 3718 metres (12198 ft) the highest mountain in Spain. Teide’s distinctive snowy peak dominates almost every aspect of Tenerife, in the process making it the tenth highest island in the world.

Away from Teide and not far from the island’s capital of Santa Cruz de Tenerife sits the unassuming town of Güímar, which would have little to attract the casual visitor if it wasn’t home to a mysterious collection of pyramids that some think are proof that humans crossed the Atlantic centuries before Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

In the early 1990s Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl became aware of some unusual heaps of rock that, it was claimed, were “real pyramids on the Canaries”. Intrigued, Heyerdahl relocated to the island, where he quickly saw parallels between the terraced structures he found there and other pyramidal edifices in Egypt and Mesoamerica.

Heyerdahl had made his name leading the 1947 Kon-Tiki expedition, sailing 5000 miles across the Pacific in a hand-built raft made from balsa wood. The idea was to demonstrate, using indigenous materials and technology, that early pre-Columbian peoples from South America could have settled the Polynesian islands. The success of the expedition – as well as his subsequent Ra and Ra II voyages – convinced him that transoceanic cultural contact and exchange had taken place hundreds if not thousands of years earlier than previously thought. Now in Tenerife he believed he had found evidence that the same thing had happened in the Atlantic.

Between 1991 and 1998, with the agreement of Heyerdahl, archaeologists from the nearby University of La Laguna excavated the site and found numerous objects from the 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as a walled up lava cave that had been inhabited by aboriginal Guanches, the mysterious original Berber inhabitants of the islands who had most likely migrated from mainland Africa around 3000 years ago. The archaeologists concluded that the terraces were created as a byproduct of agricultural practices in the 1800s; the local rural population, it was suggested, had formed these structures as cultivatable land was cleared of stones.

Heyerdahl, however, was having none of it. Instead he posited that the rocks had come not from the local area but from the lava fields of Mount Teide, and that the mounds were not some random collection of stones but rather had a profound astronomical significance. At around the same time as the archaeologists were beginning their excavations it was discovered that by standing on the platform of the largest pyramid on the day of the Summer Solstice it was possible to observe a double sunset – first the sun would sink behind a mountain top, then reemerge and set behind a neighbouring peak. Further, all of the pyramids have stairs on their western side which, when climbed, will leave an individual facing the rising sun on the Winter solstice. The pyramids, contested Heyerdahl, were therefore of pre-Hispanic origins and had important religious and ceremonial functions – the presence of the Guanche cave proof that they were responsible for its construction.

The whole 65,000m² pyramid complex is now a museum dedicated to both to the pyramids and Heyerdahl’s theories of early transatlantic travel. Situated on the edge of town, the self-styled ‘Ethnographic Park’ contains six pyramids, a museum, an auditorium and various other temporary exhibition spaces, almost all with the sole aim of documenting Heyerdahl’s voyages and advancing his theories.

Strolling around the pyramids is a surprisingly pleasant activity, particularly as a walkway skirting around the edge of pyramids one to four is lined with a variety of plants, flowers and trees from all over the Canary Islands, as well as regular information panels documenting rural Canarian life. The pyramids themselves are modest in scale – anyone expecting structures on a par with Giza or Chichen Itza is going to be sorely disappointed. They’re shaped a little like miniature ziggurats, each with a stepped appearance leading up to a large flat platform. The largest of these can’t be much more than five or six metres in height but the platforms themselves are far greater in proportion to their other dimensions than similar constructions elsewhere, giving a definite sense of elongation. A series of parallel walls also criss-crosses the site, their rocks similar in colour and texture to those that make up the pyramids. It’s not possible to touch or climb them but the walkway gets you fairly close; for the best view head for the aptly-named “Panoramic Terrace”.

The remaining couple of pyramids are isolated from the rest of the group and it’s here that you can really see how tightly the stones that make up the pyramids are packed together, as well as the straight lines of the individual steps that would have been hard to achieve if the stones had been randomly dumped in situ. Whoever built these pyramids – and for whatever purpose – clearly did so in a deliberate fashion.

For Heyerdahl, however, it was the pyramids’ supposed similarity with other ancient edifices around the world that proved the transatlantic link, and it’s a theme that’s taken up with gusto in the accompanying museum. Those already familiar with the topic will recognise well-worn motifs; images of beardless American Indians are pictured alongside native impressions of bearded men with European features; a white man with blonde hair sacrificed by dark-skinned natives in pre-Columbian Aztec art; apparently idiosyncratic pottery with Old and New World equivalents; and cultural practices such as trepanation, hieroglyphic writing, mummification, and the construction of reed boats that appeared to develop spontaneously and simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic are all cited as evidence of early oceanic exchange. Tenerife, so the theory goes, was merely a stepping stone on an ancient Atlantic shipping route.

But it’s pyramids, of course, that take centre stage. Dozens of examples are depicted from all over the world – from Tahiti to Guatemala and from North Africa to South East Asia – and all with a distinctive stepped shape that are to varying degrees reminiscent of Güímar. It’s hard not to leave the park feeling at least a little persuaded, even if the pyramids don’t look that old; it is strange, after all, that such apparent similarities in culture and construction should develop in isolation from each other.

Near the exit to the complex stands two somewhat kitsch statues stood side by side, one of a Spaniard in Conquistador-style garb and the other in native dress. Between them lies a plaque inscribed with a final thought from the park’s founder:

“The Discoverer and the Conquered. The sea was their common highway. These islands became their common home. The sea was the birthplace of life on this planet. The sea tied the early seafarers together and set mankind on the road to cultural contact and civilisation”.

Heyerdahl himself died in 2002, just four years after his Parque Etnográfico opened to the public. Despite the conclusions of the archeologists involved in the original excavations Heyerdahl went to his grave believing them to have been built by the ancient Guanches – part of a prehistoric oceanic superhighway that connected the continents aeons before modern Europeans managed to achieve just that.