San Cristóbal de La Laguna

**The Canaries' original inhabitants — Berbers who arrived thousands of years ago, and who ended as an independent people with the Spanish conquest.** ✅ **Who they were**: **the Guanches were the islands' indigenous people** — ⚠ **of **Berber (Amazigh) North African origin****, **now established by genetic and linguistic analysis**; ✅ **and they most likely arrived **around 2,000–2,500 years ago****. ⚠ **One puzzle is unresolved**: **how did they get there?** — **they had no seaworthy boats when Europeans arrived**, ⚠ **and did not travel between the islands**; **the likeliest explanation is that they were carried over in one wave and then cut off**. ✅ **Their life**: **goat herding, barley growing, and living in caves and huts**, **in a society divided into small kingdoms**; ⚠ **with Stone Age technology** — **no metals, because the islands have none**. ✅ **The conquest**: **began in the 15th century and ended with the fall of **Tenerife in 1496**** — ⚠ **the last island to hold out**; **and the Guanches resisted for years and once defeated the Spanish at Acentejo**. ⚠ **What followed**: **deaths in the fighting, and **European epidemics** that killed far more**, **enslavement, and then absorption by intermarriage**. ✅ **They did not vanish genetically**: ⚠ **modern analyses show a substantial share of Canarian DNA today — the maternal line especially — is of Guanche origin**; ✅ **but the language and the independent culture ended**.