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The earliest settlement is estimated at around 200 BC, although it is possible that it could have been earlier than that. Although it is not now considered to be the case, it was long suggested that Cro-Magnon, the Paleolithic predecessor to Homo sapiens, first inhabited the Canaries. Ancient skulls witness a lot of features of the original inhabitants, but apart from those, the conquering Europeans' 15th-century descriptions of locals gives us an idea of them. Mainly on Tenerife, there where tall and powerfully built people with blue eyes and long fair hair. These people called themselves Guanches, from guan, 'man', and che or achinch meaning 'white mountain', in reference to the snow-capped Teide volcano. Assumptions for the origins of the Guanches have varied from Celtic immigrants from mainland Spain or Portugal, to Norse invaders, providing with an explanation for the fair hair and blue eyes.
The Guanches lived out of farming, herding, hunting and gathering, and the majority of them had caves for a home. In the late 13th or early 14th century, the Genoese captain Lanzarotto Malocello comes across the island -that would be later named after him as Lanzarote - and that is the first vague suggestion about Europeans landing there.
Europeans, Normans in particular, attempted for the first time to conquer the Guanches from France in 1402, and the final campaigns more or less ended in 1495 under a Galician soldier of fortune. The century viewed massacres, warfare and Guanches sold off wholesale into slavery, and within another century their language had disappeared, and the survivors had intermarried with the invaders, converted to Christianity and taken Spanish names.
Spain was also severely challenged in keeping control of the islands itself. First Moroccan troops occupied Lanzarote in 1569 and 1586, and then Sir Francis Drake tried a gunboat diplomacy off Las Palmas capital of Gran Canaries in 1595. A Dutch fleet turned Las Palmas to rubble in 1599, and then in 1657 the Brits with Admiral Robert Blake ahead defeated the Spanish at Tenerife. The Spanish treasure fleet was completely destroyed and the British lost one ship.
Spain managed to hold on though, and the Canaries were declared a province of Spain in 1821. Santa Cruz de Tenerife was declared the official capital, stirring the already low-level power struggle between Tenerife and Gran Canaria. The inhabitants of Gran Canaria demanded that the province be split into two, which they managed for a short and unsuccessful period in the 1840s. Several agricultural products followed boom-bust cycles on the islands: sugar cane, wine and then cochineal for making dyes all had their day, followed by bananas and to a lesser extent tomatoes and potatoes.
Canaries Modern History
The banana trade was ruined after the WWI British maritime obstruction of Europe and Canarios left in droves searching for a new life in Latin America.
The civil war in 1936 destroyed any hope that followed WWI. In March of that year, the Spanish Republic transferred General Franco to the Canaries, under the suspicion that he was involved in a plot to overthrow the government. Franco seized the islands in July, and then flew to Morocco to continue the fight, leaving the Nationalists to round up Republican sympathisers in the islands.
The Canaries suffered from the same post-war misery like Spain, and again thousands left mainly for Venezuela. In the 1950s 16,000 left the country; a third of those who attempted the journey were gone in leaky boats. By the early '60s, Franco decided to open the doors to sun-starved tourists. That was the biggest boom that identified the Canaries as a mass market destination.
The Coalición Canaria played a large role in the right wing Partido Popular's win at the general elections in 1996. They have lent their support to the government under the condition that consideration be given first and foremost to their needs, putting the interests of the islands before any national considerations
Canaries Recent History
Having been granted the status of an autonomous region in 1982, in recent times the Canaries have been gaining back their political strength. The islands are most often in the news these days because of the thousands and thousands of sub-Saharan African immigrants that arrive in precarious (and for the most part illegal) conditions to their shores.
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