(Canary Islands, Spain) Dave finally gets his arse in gear, and posts photographs from his visit to the mysterious ancient Pyramids of Güímar in the Canary Islands.
For most of us, Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, conjures up a dead-end zone of package-holiday hell. A place where thick-necked pale-skinned beer-swillers are carted in like cattle, to fry their sweaty, hungover bodies in the African sunshine.
This is just part of the picture – the horrors of Tenerife are confined to one dreadful stretch of the south coast. The Canarians aren’t crazy – they ship the undiscerning visitors off to the most barren, desolate part of the island.
The rest of Tenerife is stunningly beautiful – from the cactus deserts of the lowlands, to the alpine forests on the way up to the Martian Plateau that sits below the volcano of El Teide.
On the east coast, not far from the capital, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, is the small, and otherwise innocuous town of Güímar, which is home to the Pirámides de Güímar – a stunning collection of small pyramids, contained in a small park.
The six step pyramids of Güímar are still something of a mystery – they were originally suspected to have been constructed by farmers who stacked the chunks of rock while clearing land. This was, apparently, common practice on the islands. On the other hand, there used to be nine pyramids at Güímar – the others have vanished, possibly used as building materials.
In 1991, the Norwegian ethnographer and adventurer Thor Heyerdahl (of Kon-Tiki fame) discovered that the ‘heaps of rock’ were something more – they were in fact bona fide pyramids, with similarities to those build by the Mayans and Aztecs in Mexico.
Heyerdahl also ascertained that the rocks had not come from the surrounding fields – the rocks are actually lava, from the lava fields of El Teide. He also found an astronomical orientation – on the summer solstice, a double sunset can be seen from the platform of the biggest pyramid at Güímar. The sun sinks behind a mountain peak, moves behind it, then appears again before setting behind the next mountain – two settings for the price of one.
In addition, of all the existing pyramids of stairs on their western side, leading towards the rising sun on the winter solstice. Heyerdahl never did find out how old the pyramids were – or who built them. Some Guanches, the first known inhabitants of the Canary Islands, who were still in the Stone Age when explorers arrives during the middle ages, lived in a cave under the pyramids – which is not necessarily proof of anything.
Heyerdahl did propose that the Canaries were part of an ancient shipping lane between the Mediterranean (Egypt?) and the Americas, long before Christopher Columbus, Leifr Eiríksson, or St. Brendan ever set sail.
Back in 1970, Heyerdahl had sailed from Morocco to Barbados, in the Caribbean in a boat named the Ra II, made from papyrus, in order to show that it was possible that the ancient Egyptians had maintained a connection with Central and South America.
Heyerdahl, who died in 2002, is very much a presence at Güímar – the museum is unafraid of advancing many of his theories, so that one walks away feeling a little persuaded, if not convinced that Güímar was a stopover point on an ancient Atlantic shipping route. It’s an accepted fact in Güímar – but not Heyerdahl was not without his detractors.
For me, the evidence is in the pyramids themselves – as I walked around the hot April sun, watching the lizards dart across the rocks, I couldn’t help seeing these ziggurats as rough prototypes or distant relations of the American pyramids. But who knows? Here on blather.net, we are forever asking questions – but we never lust after the answers.
Because the demand for answers alone can never fully satisfy. The facts about the Pirámides de Güímar will present themselves when they are good and ready.
I’ll leave you with this quote, and some photographs…
There never was an explanation which didn’t itself need to be explained – Charles Fort
+More+
+External links+
Official website: Pirámides de Güímar »
Wikipedia: Pyramids of Güímar »
+Blather links+
Giant Ancient Pyramid Found In Bosnia ?
China’s pyramids in danger of collapsing
+Photos+
View the full set of the Pyramids of Guimar photos on davewalshphoto.com
View the full set of the Pyramids of Guimar photos on davewalshphoto.com
Find the Pyramids of Guimar on Google Maps »
Blah Blah Blah Bullshit. If you try to buid a really tall structure out os stone it will be crushed under its weight. The only way to overcome this is to build in steps. Derr! Thats why this shape is found all over the planet. It aint lost civilations or ailiens…its scientific facts.
I thought my Irish friends might like this…Erin Go Bragh!
Boston, Dearborn, The IRA and Hezbollah:
If you grow up in the Boston area in the late 60s and early 70s you know about the IRA/Boston connection. You also had best friends, girlfriends and all the other good stuff that Ireland gave this nation too. I love the Irish and wont bother waxing about all the benefits we have here in the US because of them, it would take a mighty tome. But the Irish in Boston did have something else. I say did have ‘cause they dropped it (sorry) like a hot potato. That’s their support of the IRA.
As any one here knows, to live in and around Southie (south Boston) meant knowing someone or knowing someone who knew someone who was connected in some distant way with the “struggle”. In my case a school friends cousin who raised money for the IRAs political wing. I always thought of them as terrorist and so did my friend but we kept our opinions at the time to ourselves.
In fact most Boston Irish knew that the IRA was a terror group. A lot however didn’t mind since they wanted the British to leave Northern Ireland.
Those who did support the IRA have long ago stooped. The final straw was the Omagh bombing. It capped a long evolution in the eyes of American Irish of the IRA going from freedom fighters (not my opinion) to simple bloodthirsty terrorist.
An often told tale among those who ceased their support of the IRA and needing affirmation in that change of heart was the apocryphal tale of the Belfast catholic hardware storeowner who was “robed” in the early days of the IRA by masked gunmen. They took what they wanted but left a wad of cash behind. Years later they returned again for
Read the rest at my site please.. http://amassachusettsrepublican.blogspot.com/
Uhh, what the hell does the IRA and Boston have to do with pyramids in Tenerife? I fear you may be a little confused. There is, however, a Canarian seperatist movemment…
Whatever happened to the Blather I loved? It was all about the fucking UFO’s. Where have they gone? Where did we go? What has the IRA got to do with some pyramids in the Canary Islands that I never heard about?
Interesting. They are so neat and well kept. So are the boats. I guess they hauled them inland to save them from the tourists and archeologists.
We got tired of UFOs. But bear with us, I have a UFO-related tirade in the pipeline. We’ve been here all the time, Mr. Mulder.
Pyramids are the easiest large structures to build, but you have to put everything in historical context here. In the 16th century when the Europeans arrived (there are classical sources on this too) the people of the Azores were at a technological level similiar to the stone age. They were a pre-agricultural society that farmed very little, and when doing so used neolithic-like techniques.
The inhabitants described to the Europeans that they were the decendants of survivors of an island civilization that was destroyed. Roman historians, and even the Greek Herdotus, report the same thing, almost 2000 years earlier.
How then could these pyramids have been constructed by this group of people? From what I have read on the subject, granted very little, the natives weren’t technologically able to construct them. Add to this the suggestion that the pyramids seem to have a cultic function similiar to the Mesoamerican pyramids, evidenced by the alignments discussed in the above article, and an interesting question emerges. Could there have been trans-atlantic contact, or could these two groups of people, the Mesoamericans and the Azore natives, have been influenced by a common contact?
Among the original inhabitants of the Canaries many were fair-haired and bearded. The Aztecs, Mayans, and their forerunners, claim that they were brought civilization by a white masked, bearded man – Quetzalcoatl.
It is quite probable that the people who built those structures were the ancestors of the Guanches, who were brutally massacred by the Spanish (one of the few reactions that ignorant Spaniards have had when meeting foreign people).
It is probable, because any civilization can collapse after experiencing a period of prosperity. As for Thor Heyerdahl, you better take what this guy has to say with a cartload of salt, because he maintained that the people of Rapa Nui, Easter Islands, were not the builders of the great statues (Moai). Subsequent research has found that in fact Easter islanders DID build the statues and that it accelerated their downfall.
The same thing probably happened with people in Malta (ancient structures dating 1200 BCE have been found) or Zimbabwe and dozens of time all over the planet.
A “Westerner” (or European/American) refusing to admit that other civilizations had it better than the West, and BEFORE the West is in a way a racist…
how do you ‘Forget’ how to pile stones on top of each other in a pyramidy type style, especialy when you have the benefit of a few of these things already on the island as a reference.
the transatlantic staging point seems most likely, however I wouldnt be convinced that the spread was from east to west, judging by the limited documentation the spanish and portugese made before both intentionaly and unintentionaly wiping out the native population, it would apear that they were, in some areas anyway, far advanced on anything Europe had achieved.
Weapons unfortunatley werent one of their strong points, but astrology was.
“how do you ‘Forget’ how to pile stones on top of each other in a pyramidy type style, especialy when you have the benefit of a few of these things already on the island as a reference.”
It is not much “forgetting” as getting out of use, as any cultural phenomenon in history of mankind. Take for example the disbelief of elders in a village of rural Appalachia as to the possibility of building a church with stones larger than a cubic feet. These were the descendents of cathedral builders, and this was the 1920s…
Geographic locales which are far from the main circuits of human economies, like the Canaries, often fall back fast if some event cuts them off from the other sites of civilisation.
Again, the possibility of collapse or regression is always at hand for any human population, and it has happened often enough in humanity’s past and will happen again.
In the United States there was a systematic destruction of the electric streetcar networks, which was both technologically and socially more avanced than the explosion motor car.
This might have seemed as an improvement at the time may prove to be the downfall of the US (and North america)
Yes I would agree that regression occurs when a civilisation is isolated from any flow of talent or ideas instrumental in development.
however it would take a substantial backward leap to regress past the point from where you started, without retaining any of the technology or ideas that prompted your development initialy.
The topic of trams is an interesting one, Melbourne still has trams and they are briliantly useful, and have even given the world the hook turn ( a crazy idea of turning right from the left had lane)
and many cities are replacing their tram service. from what I read there was a push by – I think these are the companies – GM, Firestone & Enron (not sure about the last one)to replace the efficent steel wheeled electric trams with petrol burning rubber wheeled busses. I think the link was Bildeberg . org but I’ll have to look it up
if you’re irish, how is that you’re not all getting drunk at playa de las americas?
Guanchi – is that at the resorts at the south of the Island? I drove through, very fast. What a shithole!
not all of us are beer swilling fatties broiling in the sun. Some of us go ‘cos its cheap and the kids can have a whale of a time. Get real will you Dave. Your photos are that good by the way. Get yourself a decent camera.
Shirley, with all due respect, what now? I have a decent camera! Oh, and I am real. Very real. I was on La Gomera earlier this year. Now that’s real!