The so-called Pyramids of Güímar

The so-called Pyramids of Güímar are a tourist attraction in the southeast of Tenerife (Güímar, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain). The site is a 64,000 m² series of stone-built terraces (now partly destroyed). They seem to be 19th-century agricultural terraces and field walls. They seem to have been formed during the 1800s when local landowners cleared rocks from arable fields to prepare the land for cultivation by piling the stones systematically into structured terraces, a common regional practice known as majanos (but of course terraces appear whenever areas of stony land on hillslopes are cleared for fields). Excavations conducted by the University of La Laguna in the 1990s uncovered 19th-century pottery shards and domestic items buried directly in the soil layers underneath the terraces (Gómez and Mederos 1996).

Some of the terraces have been claimed to have astronomical alignments (Belemonte, Aparicio and Estaban 1993 etc.), but why modern terraces should be aligned this way is not clear. The site was opened to the public in 1998, sponsored by a Norwegian investor, Fred Olsen, who owns the largest ship and ferry company in the Canary Islands.

The famous Norwegian explorer and ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl became fascinated by the site in 1991, when he moved to Tenerife with his third wife (Jacqueline Beer) with whom he became very actively involved with several archaeological projects until his death in 2002 [this was well after his Kon-Tiki stunt (1947), the 1955–1956 expedition to Easter Island and the Ra sailings of the 1970s]. Heyerdahl argued that the structures were meticulously designed step pyramids that shared uncanny structural similarities with ancient temples in Peru, Mexico, and Mesopotamia. He proposed that the Canary Islands served as a crucial geographic stopping point for ancient Mediterranean or African mariners who sailed to the Americas thousands of years before Christopher Columbus. He believed the indigenous Guanches of Tenerife originally constructed the pyramids based on these seafaring connections.

REFERENCES
J. A. Belmonte, A. Aparicio and C. Esteban 1993, 'A solsticial marker in Tenerife: the Majanos de Chacona', in: Archaeoastronomy (supplement of Journal for the History of Astronomy), No. 18.

Antonio Aparicio Juan/César Esteban López 2005, 'Las Pirámides de Güímar: mito y realidad'. Centro de la Cultura Popular Canaria, La Laguna 2005, ISBN 978-84-7926-510-6.

Aparicio, A., Esteban, C. 2015, 'A Modern Myth - The “Pyramids” of Güímar' In: Ruggles, C. (eds) Handbook of Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6141-8_107

Maria Cruz Jiménez Gómez/Juan Francisco Navarro Mederos 1996, 'El complejo de las morras de Chacona (Güímar, Tenerife): resultados del proyecto de investigación', XII Coloquio de Historia Canario-Americana (1996), Cabildo Insular de Gran Canaria, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria 1998, vol. 1.