The Canary Islands are an Atlantic archipelago of seven principal islands — Tenerife, Gran Canaria, Lanzarote, Fuerteventura, La Palma, La Gomera, and El Hierro — lying roughly a hundred kilometres off the coast of southern Morocco. They constitute a Spanish autonomous community.
The pre-Hispanic indigenous population, collectively called the Guanches, were Berber peoples who likely crossed from the African mainland in successive waves during the first millennium BCE and the early first millennium CE. Each island had its own polity, language variant, and material culture; common features included cave dwellings, mummification of the dead on Tenerife and Gran Canaria, livestock pastoralism, and the use of the silbo whistled register on La Gomera.
The Guanche language is extinct. It is reconstructed from the libyco-berber rock inscriptions of the islands, from place names — Tenerife, Tegueste, Tamadaba — and from word lists recorded by Spanish chroniclers. The reconstructed forms align closely with continental Berber, particularly with Tachelhit and Zenaga vocabulary.
The Castilian conquest unfolded over almost a century, from the seigneurial expedition of Jean de Béthencourt to Lanzarote in 1402 to the surrender of Tenerife in 1496. The indigenous population was reduced by warfare, enslavement, and epidemic disease; survivors were assimilated into the colonial population.
The whistled language Silbo Gomero, used to communicate across the deep ravines of La Gomera, was inscribed by UNESCO on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009.