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MEET THE MUMMIES YOU'VE NEVER HEARD OF

Scientists are using high-tech tools to help solve the mystery of how the Canary
Islands came to be inhabited.

This mummy once rested in a fabled Tenerife cave whose location was lost to
history, though experts may have pinpointed its coordinates...Show moreShow more
Photograph by Fernando Velasco Mora
Courtesy of the National Archaeological Museum, Madrid
ByEmma Lira
Published April 27, 2022
• 25 min read
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This story was adapted from National Geographic's Spain edition.

Canary Islands, SpainFrom the cliffside path that leads down to the sea, about
four kilometers away, I come to a halt. This is the spot: a cave, its entrance
barely visible. I look up at the looming face of the rock. I sense it staring
back at me, beckoning with its stash: hundreds of caves, built over the
centuries from the lava flows of Mount Teide. Any one of them could be the cave
we’re looking for—here, history has not yet been written.

Within this gorge in southern Tenerife, the largest of Spain’s Canary Islands, a
stunning cave was found in 1764 by Spanish regent and infantry captain Luis
Román. A contemporary local priest and writer described the find in a book on
the history of the islands: “A wonderful pantheon has just been discovered,”
José Viera y Clavijo wrote. “So full of mummies that no less than a thousand
were counted.” And thus the tale of the thousand mummies was born. (Read about
the different types of mummies found worldwide.)

Few things are more exciting than navigating the ambiguous edge between history
and legend. Now, two and a half centuries later, in the gorge known as Barranco
de Herques—also called “ravine of the dead” for its funerary caves—we find
ourselves in the place that most local archaeologists consider to be the
mythical “cave of the thousand mummies.” There are no written coordinates; its
location has been passed on by word of mouth among a chosen few. The hikers who
venture along the path are oblivious to its existence.

The archipelago's volcanic underpinnings created a system of lava tubes on
Tenerife—an ideal environment for entombment.
Photograph by Robert Harding, Nat Geo Image Collection
Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.


In the company of islander friends, I feel privileged to be shown the place
where they believe their ancestors once rested. I crouch toward the narrow
opening, turn on my headlamp and drop to the ground. To find this hidden realm,
we crawl in on our stomachs for a few claustrophobic meters. But there’s a
reward for subjecting ourselves to the tight squeeze: a tall, spacious chamber
suddenly opens before me, holding the promise of a journey to the island’s past.

“As archaeologists we assume that the expression ‘thousand mummies’ was probably
an exaggeration, a way to suggest that there were indeed a lot, a whole
lot—hundreds,” says Mila Álvarez Sosa, a local historian and Egyptologist. In
the darkness, our eyes slowly adjust. We survey the space for the telltale signs
of a necropolis in the meandering lava tube, part of an extensive system across
the island.

These weren’t the first mummies to be unearthed on the island. But according to
local lore, a large sepulchral cave like this one held the pantheon of the nine
Mencey kings who ruled the islands in precolonial times.

The cave’s location was a scrupulously guarded secret. And there was no record
of it, which only served to elevate it as the holy grail of Canarian
archaeology. Locals maintain they don’t disclose the location in order to
protect the memory of their ancestors who rested there, the Guanches, the
Indigenous people of this island—no distinct Guanche population remains today.
Others say it was lost to a landslide, buried forever. (Go beyond the beaches in
the Canary Islands.)

What may have been a certainty for those 18th century explorers morphed into
legend when the mummies were plucked from their resting place and their location
was lost. But the precious few—from that cave and others—that remain intact and
are held in museum collections are helping scientists unravel the story about
the archipelago: when and where the first inhabitants came from, and how they
honored their dead.


Printed in a 1746 book, this etching of a burial cave in Tenerife was based on
the account of a Welsh doctor who claimed he visited the site. It matched the
description of a necropolis discovered by a Spanish captain some 20 years
later—dubbed the cave of the thou...Read MoreRead More
Charles-Nicolas Cochin, Antiqua Print Gallery / Alamy
Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.


PRESERVING THE DECEASED FOR ETERNITY  

Tenerife was the last island in the archipelago to fall to the Castilian crown,
beginning in 1494. It wasn’t the first confrontation the islanders had with
Europeans, but it would be the last. Álvarez Sosa imagines the stark contrast
when at the end of the 15th century, the dawn of the Renaissance, soldiers
sailed in on ships and wielded swords on horseback. They came face to face with
a people just emerging from the Neolithic era, cave dwellers who wore animal
skins and used tools made of sticks and stones. “But yet they honored their
dead, preparing them for their last trip,” Álvarez Sosa says. “They preserved
them.”



The afterlife

Mirlado is the name of the process early inhabitants of Tenerife and Gran
Canaria used to preserve their mummies. The work was done by professional
embalmers, and the families of the deceased transferred the body to its final
resting place. Mummification in the archipelago was distinct from Egyptian
practices.

Dragon tree resin

Animal fat

1

Tuff rock

The body was cleansed with water and herbs to remove impurities. It was then
coated with animal fat to intensify the sun’s power.

Pumice stone dust

2

Pine and heather bark

A mixture of minerals, herbs, tree bark, and dragon tree resin—often referred to
as blood because of its reddish hue—was applied to every inch of the body’s
surface to halt decay. Volcanic ash and lapilli were inserted through the mouth,
rectum, and small incisions between the ribs to stop internal decomposition.

Lapilli

Aromatic herbs

3

The dehydration process took 15 days and involved laying the body on hot sand in
full sun during the day, and exposing it to smoke from a fire at night.

4

At the end of the drying process, family members wrapped the body in goatskin
and took it to its final resting place in one of the caves or lava tubes within
the extensive system created by the feared Teide Volcano, where conditions would
facilitate its preservation.

Content created by the Spanish edition of National Geographic Magazine

Almudena Cuesta. Sources: Mila Álvarez Sosa; Guanche Mummies, Story Productions

The afterlife

Mirlado is the name of the process early inhabitants of Tenerife and Gran
Canaria used to preserve their mummies. The work was done by professional
embalmers, and the families of the deceased transferred the body to its final
resting place. Mummification in the archipelago was distinct from Egyptian
practices.

Dragon tree resin

Animal fat

Tuff rock

Pumice stone dust

1

Pine and heather bark

Lapilli

Lapilli

2

Aromatic

herbs

Aromatic herbs

3

4

The body was cleansed with water

and herbs to remove impurities. It

was then coated with animal fat to

intensify the sun’s power.

1

A mixture of minerals, herbs, tree

bark, and dragon tree resin—often

referred to as blood because of its

reddish hue—was applied to every

inch of the body’s surface to halt

decay. Volcanic ash and lapilli were

inserted through the mouth, rectum,

and small incisions between the ribs

to stop internal decomposition.

2

The dehydration process took 15

days and involved laying the body

on hot sand in full sun during the

day, and exposing it to smoke

from a fire at night.

3

At the end of the drying process,

family members wrapped the body

in goatskin and took it to its final

resting place in one of the caves or

lava tubes within the extensive

system created by the feared Teide

Volcano, where conditions would

facilitate its preservation.

4

Content created by the Spanish edition of National Geographic Magazine

Almudena Cuesta. Sources: Mila Álvarez Sosa; Guanche Mummies, Story Productions

A fascination with death led the colonists to chronicle the funerary ritual in
detail. “That’s what mainly caught the attention of the Castilian conquerors,”
says Álvarez Sosa. In particular, they were intrigued by the embalming
process—mirlado—that prepared the xaxos, as the Guanche mummies were called, for
eternity.

The cave walls are silent. Submerged in the darkness, I imagine the awe Luis
Román must have felt when, imbued with the spirit of the Enlightenment and
accompanied by locals, he entered the necropolis on a mission to retrieve a few
specimens for study. He transported the bodies to Europe where, by the 18th
century, mummies represented a scientific curiosity as well as a novelty; both
scholars and collectors took an interest. 

I picture the moment Román raised his torch, revealing hundreds of bodies frozen
in time. He must have been overcome by a mixture of sacrilege and exhilaration.
Curiously the writer who summarized a report of their visit omitted the
location. If the intention was to preserve the cave from plunder, he regrettably
failed: by 1833 multiple sources confirmed no bodies remained. (Learn more about
Egypt's royal mummies.)

I stand up and shake the white dust from my hands and knees. My headlamp dimly
illuminates the walls. Though I know there’s not even a remote possibility, in
my heart I still long to spot a xaxo (pronounced haho) in some nook or cranny,
just like Viera y Clavo described.

The method for preserving these corpses for their battle against time and nature
was surprisingly simple. “It’s the same process you would use with food,” says
Álvarez Sosa. “The bodies were treated with dry herbs and lard and were left to
dry in the sun and smoked by fire.” It took 15 days to prepare a xaxo, compared
with 70 for an Egyptian mummy (40 days to dehydrate in naturally occurring
natron salt, then 30 days of embalming in oils and spices before the cavity of
the corpse was filled with straw or cloth and wrapped in linen). Another key
difference: according to chronicles, for propriety women in the Canary Islands
participated in the process, handling female corpses.


Geneticist Rosa Fregel removes a mummy tooth for DNA testing, to trace the
origins of these early islanders.


Photograph courtesy of The Golden Mummy, Story Productions
Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.

Later, the family of the deceased handled the xaxo, placing it in a cured and
carefully stitched bag made of animal hide—usually goat. The number of hide
layers corresponded to the person’s social standing. The practice wasn’t limited
to Tenerife. Mummies have also been found on neighboring Gran Canaria island,
decorated with etchings or painted in multiple hues, wrapped in a reed mat, and
then deposited in hollow tree trunks. Corpses also have been found there in
funerary caves.

“We still have many questions—and few samples to study,” says archaeologist
María García, curator at the Institute of Bioanthropology in Santa Cruz de
Tenerife. She’s painstakingly catalogued the history, dates, and origin of the
remains of the 30 or so xaxos in the institute’s drawers. In this immaculate
morgue, the bodies of men, women, and children slumber in repose, just steps
from one of the city’s thriving thoroughfares, Noria Street. These xaxo remnants
were found by hikers and shepherds across sites in Tenerife. So the question
lingers: What happened to the ‘thousand mummies’? Or was it all a fabrication?



“It was systematic plunder,” María García says bluntly. “During the 17th and
18th centuries the mummies were a lure for the European cultured classes. Our
xaxos traveled around the world to be placed in museums and private collections,
and some were even ground into aphrodisiac powders.”

Others might have ended up at the bottom of the sea, Álvarez Sosa posits in her
book Tierras de Momias (Lands of Mummies), probably thrown overboard when balmy
conditions on the ship activated the decomposition process during the trip to
the Continent. (What surprising new clues are revealing about ancient bog
mummies.)

Despite having the intact Guanche mummy and remains of three dozen more, we know
very little about their tombs. “No archaeologist has ever found a xaxo in its
original environment,” María García explains.

A CT scan performed in 2016 on the same mummy—the best example of the 40 in
museum collections—in a Madrid hospital allowed researchers to peer into its
interior without damaging its structure.
Photograph by Raúl Tejedor, RTVE / Story Productions
Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.



SEEKING ANSWERS

This is not the first time I traveled to the Canaries seeking answers. Eight
years ago I rappelled down a cliff face in the gorge, peering into a dozen caves
in search of the legend. I reread 15th- and 16th-century chronicles and
interviewed experts to unravel the origins of the early Canarians.

These were the mythical Fortunate Isles where ancient Mediterranean seafarers
had once landed. The Europeans who later encountered the islands in the Middle
Ages found that unlike other Atlantic archipelagos, these islands were
inhabited, their populations seemingly isolated for centuries. 

Chronicles spoke of tall Caucasians, which sowed the seeds for now refuted
hypotheses: they alternately descended from shipwrecked Basque, Iberian, Celtic,
or Viking sailors. I left the island without coming much closer to any answers.
But now modern technology has put an end to the enigma that lasted for
centuries. The mummies have spoken.

Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.
Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.
“It looked like a wooden sculpture of Christ,” said radiologist Javier
Carrascoso of the 900-year-old Guanche xaxo whose hands and feet were carefully
bound.
Photographs by Fernando Velasco Mora
Courtesy of the National Archaeological Museum, Madrid


If the place I'm now exploring is the cave described by Viera y Clavijo, this is
where the mummy at the top began its long voyage. The circuitous tale begins in
1764, when it was shipped to Madrid as a gift to King Charles III for the court
to take in the workmanship of the Guanches in sending their dead to eternity. In
1878 it was on exhibit at the Paris World’s Fair, before it was returned to
Madrid, where it lay for over a century in what is today the National Museum of
Anthropology. In 2015 it came to its current resting place, the city’s National
Archaeology Museum. One night in June 2016 under tight security the mummy was
taken on its shortest outing ever: to a nearby hospital for a CT scan.

“We had already had CT scans of several Egyptian mummies,” says Javier
Carrascoso, associate chief of radiology at Madrid’s QuirónSalud University
Hospital, which offered to extend the technology to the Guanche mummy. The scan
provided data that debunked a hypothesis that they had simply dehydrated
naturally as well as the theory that the Guanche mummification process was
derived from Egypt, some 3,000 miles away. (Learn how mummies show clues to
ancient diseases.)

“It was impressive,” says Carrascoso. “The Guanche mummy was much better
preserved than the Egyptian [ones].” The definition of its muscles could still
be observed, and the hands and feet in particular were outlined in detailed
relief. “It looked like a wooden sculpture of Christ,” he says. 

But the most remarkable finding was hidden: unlike its Egyptian counterpart, the
Guanche mummy had not been eviscerated. Its organs, including the brain, were
perfectly intact thanks to a mixture—minerals, aromatic herbs, bark of pine and
heather, and resin from its native dragon tree—that halted bacteria and thus
decay, inside and out. Radiocarbon dating in 2016 revealed a tall, healthy male,
perhaps a member of the elite, given the condition of his hands, feet, and
teeth. 

He was probably between 35 and 40 years old when he died around 800 to 900 years
ago, well before the Castilians arrived. The spine showed a dysmorphia common
among North African populations, and his facial features also pointed to the
neighboring continent.


A vibrant cover embellishes the first written account of the Norman conquest of
the Canarian islands Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, a campaign that began in 1402.
Allied with the Castilian crown, nobleman Jean de Béthencourt might have sought
resources for dyes and t...Read MoreRead More
Illustration by British Library/Album
Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.

Rosa Fregel, a researcher at the University La Laguna in Tenerife who has
studied the islands’ early populations for years, applied the latest DNA
sequencing techniques to remains of 40 xaxos. The findings correlated with
earlier testing, leaving no doubt about the mummies’ kinship with North
Africans: the first inhabitants came from the Maghreb—the continent’s
northernmost reaches along the Mediterranean. That doesn’t mean they came from
the same place or at the same time. “We’ve discovered that the populations in
each of the islands have their own peculiarities,” she explains, so the
archipelago wasn’t necessarily homogeneous.




AFRICAN ORIGINS

Etymology, epigraphy, and ethnohistoric sources had already pointed to African
origins, and science now concurs. Centuries before the arrival of Islam to the
region, North Africa was inhabited by Numidian clans. The Greeks and Romans
disdained them as Berbers—“barbarians”—while the Numidians called themselves
Amazigh, or “free men.” They were farmers and animal breeders, and some arrived
in the archipelago with their trades and their domestic animals. Why did they
abandon their homes in North Africa? And how did they reach these islands, about
a hundred kilometers from the coast?

“We have always talked about waves of immigration,” says Teresa Delgado, curator
of the Canarian Museum in Las Palmas. “But maybe it was just groups of families
arriving at different times. Maybe events in North Africa, from Roman rule until
the arrival of Islam, triggered periods of migration.”

According to José Farrujia, an archaeology and history professor at the
University of La Laguna in Tenerife, seven of the eight islands have been
continuously inhabited at least for the last 10 centuries. Their populations
shared physical traits, and their now extinct languages evolved from Libyan
Berber. Farrujia also points out that cave paintings found in the archipelago
are similar to ones found in Western Sahara, Algeria, and Morocco’s Atlas
Mountains.

The first known images of the early islanders came from Italian engineer
Leonardo Torriani, dispatched to the archipelago by the Spanish crown to plan
fortifications. His maps and drawings, including one from Gomera, above, were
published in a book around 1590.
Illustration by Leonardo Torriani,
Courtesy of The General Library of the University of Coimbra
Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.


But the consensus stops there. Historians have put forth various emigration
theories. According to one scenario, the islands’ first inhabitants were
banished Berber rebels brought to the islands between 25 B.C. and 25 A.D. during
the Berber revolt against Rome. “Roman law used banishment to the islands as a
punishment,” says Antonio Tejera Gaspar, who’s written about the clash. “Ever
since the fall of Carthage, the whole region became a powder keg.”

The king who banished the rebels, he believes, was Juba II. Many historians
agree that Juba II, son of the defeated Numibian king Juba I, discovered the
Canaries. He was educated in Rome and married Cleopatra Selene, the daughter of
Cleopatra and Marc Antony. In an effort to assimilate the population, Augustus
put the couple in charge of Mauritania, which extended from today’s Tunisia to
Western Sahara. A scholar, writer, and naturalist, king Juba widely explored his
territory and some outliers: According to an account in Pliny the Elder’s
Natural History, Juba’s chronicles—since lost—note an expedition to the
Fortunate Isles in 46 B.C. 

It’s the first time the islands are named, and he refers to one of them as
Canary. He describes the natural features of each of the islands. “And if he
does not mention their people it’s because they were not inhabited,” Tejera
Gaspar says. That would come within the next century, when Rome banished the
insurrectionists, he notes. Tejera Gaspar argues that the colonists weren’t
after resources or riches since the islands lacked both.


LINGERING QUESTIONS

Or maybe not. Another theory emerged after the 2012 discovery of pottery shards
on the small island of Lobos, suggesting that early colonizers may have
frequented the islands for their natural resources. Archaeologists uncovered
pots, lanterns, hooks, and harpoons, imported and made of non-native materials,
including some originating in Andalusia—artifacts typically found along the
western Mediterranean trade routes. Shellfish deposits found in the same area
led some researchers to believe that seasonal workers landed in temporary
settlements to harvest Stramonita haemastoma, a mollusk used to make the prized
Tyrian purple dye, reserved for Roman emperors. 



“A workshop to produce the purple dye demonstrates that the archipelago was
within the Roman sphere, that the territory had been explored,” explains María
del Carmen del Arco, an archaeologist at the Lobos site, which has been dated to
the Roman period. She also points out that Roman ships could have transported
new biological stock in the form of animals, plants, and people. (Read how South
American cultures made their own mummies.)

Still, Carmen del Arco says Pliny the Elder mentions an earlier population
predating the Roman era, and archaeology backs up those dates. Some sites in
Tenerife have been dated to the 6th century B.C. and in La Palma, the 3rd
century B.C. “It all makes sense, especially if we consider that the islands
were populated from east to west, from the nearest to the farthest from the
African coast,” says José Farrujia.

Farrujia describes cave paintings on several of the islands depicting boats
similar to the Phoenician ones. “Nothing tells us that they did not know how to
sail,” says Farrujia. “There probably were boats, but perishable materials do
not leave archaeological traces.” It’s also likely that people might have been
enslaved and brought involuntarily by boat, which then departed.

Red bugloss, Echium wildpretii, a giant flower endemic to the island of
Tenerife.
Photograph by Jordi Busque, Nat Geo Image Collection
Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.


Some scholars maintain radiocarbon dating on these sites is inconclusive. And
human remains found on the islands so far do not predate the 4th century A.D.,
as Conrado Rodriguez, director of Tenerife’s Museum of Nature and Archaeology
notes. The confirmation of the ancestry of the early inhabitants has renewed
archaeology efforts, which may turn up evidence.

Who are we? Ultimately everything comes down to a quest to understand our
origins. The answer may lie within an unexplored cave, a necropolis, an etching.
The island’s topography—its gullies and ravines, hardened lava flows, caves, and
windblown sands—helps preserve those secrets.

I turn off my headlamp and find refuge in the absolute silence that shelters me
like a uterus. I feel no cold, no heat, no fear. I have come seeking answers,
and I take away the gift of knowing that questions still remain. My colleagues,
all Canarians, produce an old ceramic bowl they call a ganigo, similar to the
ones from which the Guanches drank milk to seal their pacts. They ask me a
simple question: Do you swear not to tell anyone the location of this cave?

In the darkness I cannot see their eyes, yet I know they are shining with the
same excitement as mine. With them and the souls that for centuries populated
this cave as my witnesses, I answer: Yes, I swear.

Emma Lira is the author of Búscame donde nacen los dragos, a historic novel set
in Tenerife.
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