Countless visitors to Tenerife in the Canary Islands make for the beaches and the holiday resorts not knowing that the island boasts many pyramids, which are well worth travelling to see. The ones that get the most publicity are in the town of Gúímar where they were discovered by the world famous explorer Thor Heyerdahl.
Güímar is in the south of the island on the east coast, and is easy enough to reach by bus or car. The late Thor Heyerdahl was so impressed with the pyramids and the place that he set up home there for the last decade of his life.
He had first heard about the strange constructions in a newspaper, and at the time it was being said that they were heaps of stones or agricultural terraces made by local farmers. Heyerdahl did not agree and concluded that they were step-pyramids just like he had encountered on his travels in Peru, Mexico and elsewhere in the world.
He gained the support of wealthy Norwegian shipping magnate Fred Olsen, who lived on Tenerife, and the two men set up the Ethnographic Park in Güímar, built around the six pyramids and opened it to the public in 1998.
The question was, and still is - who built the pyramids and when? Heyerdahl was not able to give an answer that the world of science and academia would agree with but he believed that at one time there were pyramid-building people who travelled the oceans on rafts and that it was possible that these people were the builders. And he had already sailed from Morocco to Barbados on the papyrus raft Ra II to prove that his theory of ocean travel on such craft was possible.
The pyramids could also been made by the mysterious Guanches, who were the original inhabitants of the Canary Islands before the Spanish invasion, although the academics portray these people as living in primitive Stone Age ways and suggest they wouldn't have been able to build such constructions.
However, that the Guanches knew about and used the pyramid shape is demonstrated by the fact that there are pyramid designs on artistic seals known as pintaderas that have been discovered. The Guanches also mummified their dead, which, of course, is something the ancient Egyptians did as well.
Thor Heyerdahl put forward the idea that the pyramids in Güímar were astronomically aligned and showed evidence for this and his theory that these mysterious monuments were once used for ceremonies at special times of the year such as the summer solstice.
So it is still not clear exactly who made the Pyramids of Güimar but Heyerdahl wanted visitors to the Ethnographic Park to make up their own minds, and so the symbol used at the exhibition for all material on display there is the question mark.
It is not just in the southern town of Güimar that there are pyramids because on the west side of the island in the north of Tenerife, there are similar and nonetheless impressive constructions of stone and earth. Pyramids can be seen on farmland near the village of San Marcos, in Santa Bárbara, in La Mancha and at Santo Domingo, and all these villages are very close to Icod de los Vinos, which is known to have been a place where the Guanches once lived.
Who built the mysterious pyramids of Tenerife has still not been settled but they are definitely worth checking out by anyone visiting the island.
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