That turned out to be a marvellous drum-shaped building with a gentle ramp spiralling up to the main display on the first floor - like so many of the museums and cultural shrines in Spain that we have seen, it is beautifully designed and managed.
The abiding mystery about these so-called Canary Islands (not named for a little song bird but for the dogs which the aboriginal inhabitants brought with them from North Africa), is who got here first, when and how on earth did they survive.
Each island has its own story. On Tenerife they were the Guanchos, and here they were Benahoaristes. Priests and explorers jotted down a very few remarks about them - their language and ways of living, but these are very sketchy.
It seems the ancients (Pliny) knew of the islands. Settlement from the African continent happened about 300BC, and again a few hundred years later. The immigrants arrived in a desperately hard place. Later, sailors would report that the fragrance of the pine woods and forests wafted far out to sea, but the reality on the land itself is the heat, the drought, the steep incline of the slopes, the harsh painful ceramic quality of the rocks.
The people had only stone to work with. No metal. Wood was in short supply - for even if they felled some of the trees, how were they to move the timber? They cannot have been very numerous, to organise labour-gangs. They made pottery. They fished and herded goats and sheep. They could use the plants for medicine and to brew some kinds of festive drinks. They had a random sort of agriculture but seem to have been mostly nomadic. They found and cherished springs up in the mountains. And they were astronomers.
In the museum is a small dark bowl - about the size of a bowling-ball. It is displayed 'upside down', and we can see various marks inscribed on it. These have been analysed and interpreted - there are exactly 365 little lines (a solar calendar) arranged into groups which can also predict lunar cycles and phases - synchronising the two systems.
They also made a series of carvings into rock faces all over the island, in a very systematic distribution. These carvings - some of which are still in place (some are in the museum) consist of series of whorls or spirals, not unlike fingerprints. They are usually about 12-15" wide, channelled out or incised, though it's not clear exactly how they were made. Rock on rock? We went to see some of them in situ at a place called la Zara y la Zarica.
The island only covers about 200 sq miles, but to drive anywhere is to subject yourself to a million zigzags - 30 miles by road = about 10 by crow (if only). La Zarza is quite high up, in a landscape quite different from the area where we are staying - a soft laurel forest, damp, quiet, dark. You park, pay your entry and set off up a watery stony path. Immediately you see a fine spring, with an ochrus origin, and water dripping and splishing. There are said to be three spiral carvings there but we couldn't see them, and felt a bit disconsolate.
However, the path takes you on and up, alongside the stream with its huge black boulders and you can hear blackbirds singing. Then, at outcrop after outcrop, you begin to see these marks. They are mute, rather humble. One of the many helpful notice boards says 'these are the Sistine Chapel of the aboriginal art on the island', and - given the very limited nature of the makers' resources, you can understand it. The interpretations show men making these carvings, sometimes on rough scaffolding. The carvings are said to be astrophyical in meaning, but to me they look intensely female and mandala-like, taking you into mysteries and deep dark spaces (like the valley or the precious water-courses themselves). I am sure these are fertility marks.
One or two people in history mentioned some of the marks but these up in the high valley were not 'discovered' till 1941. (It reminds me of Stonehenge not being 'discovered' till the 16th century. Nobody noticed it, or perhaps nobody took any notice of it).
The notice boards say that in 1994 excavations were made along this valley and various animal bones were found, and some human remains (a male between 17 and 25). They say that various tracks from the area all led to this place - so it was maybe a watering-place for the herds, and a place for feasting... But to me, the depth of the valley, the coolness, the dark, the birdsong - all these suggests something much more contemplative. The marks are spirals, meanderings, circles... really more like fingerprints, as I said. So I think this was a place where women came and made their marks, hoping for children and safe delivery, in this place so far from their irretrievable homelands in the Atlas Mountains.
As we walked back down out of the woods, the sun gradually reappeared through the blanket clouds and it warmed up quite considerably - from about 10 degrees to about 15 or 16. It is a place where you do have to be quiet and patient - no wariness, but just a sense of acceptance of an 'other' place. It's really quite a contrast with the heat and light lower down the mountain, black/white, cold/hot, wet/dry, life/death?
There are suggestions of 'worship' in the notes which early anthropologists made - a deity and a devil, and a festival involving the piling-up of stones, and of chiefs ruling different bits of the island - all rather masculine.
Competent cultures with advanced navigation techniques did get here and home again, but the settlers here were stuck. I suppose they may have been quite young. It's hard to see how anyone lived much beyond 30 or so, given the conditions.
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