El Museo Canario is the principal museum of pre-Hispanic Canarian material culture, set in the Vegueta historic quarter of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. The institution was founded in 1879 by the physician Gregorio Chil y Naranjo on the model of the European national-anthropology museums of the nineteenth century and has operated continuously since, with substantial reorganisation across the twentieth century and a major refurbishment in the 2010s.
The museum's central collection is the principal repository of Guanche skeletal and material culture. The collection comprises more than a thousand skulls, several hundred mummified bodies (the Guanche mummification tradition was practised principally on Tenerife and Gran Canaria), ceramics, lithic tools, wooden and bone implements, painted geometric idols (the so-called pintaderas), Libyco-Berber inscriptions from Gran Canaria, and the painted-and-carved cave material from the Cueva Pintada de Gáldar.
The collection has been a principal documentary basis for the modern reconstruction of Guanche language, society, and material life. The Libyco-Berber inscriptions held at the Museo Canario have been read alongside the continental Berber inscriptions at Dougga and across north Africa to establish the linguistic relationship between Guanche and the broader Berber family — a relationship now substantially confirmed through linguistic, archaeological, and genetic evidence.
The museum's library and research department maintain a continuing programme of academic publication on the pre-Hispanic Canaries, with the journal El Museo Canario in continuous publication since 1879. The institution is the principal academic resource for the study of the Guanche substrate of contemporary Canarian identity and a continuing reference for the broader scholarship on the western Berber family.