Guía de Isora is one of the five largest municipalities of Tenerife and one of the strangest in shape: a long band that climbs from the cliffs of the west coast to the foot of Pico Viejo, Teide's twin, at about 2,700 metres.⁵ Its villages are strung along that slope at the heights where water and farming allowed, and its history follows the same line, from the seasonal pastures of the Guanches in the high crater to the fishing villages and hotels of the coast.

Shepherds between the summit and the coast

The name of Isora is very old. Land grants of the early sixteenth century speak of the "malpaís de Isora", the lava fields of Isora, and of the ravine of Tejina; a member of the family of the last king of Adeje declared in 1558 that "the territory of Adeje stretches from the malpaís of Isora to the line of Abona". The archaeologists Alfredo Mederos, Gabriel Escribano and Vicente Valencia therefore place the area inside the menceyato of Adeje. They add a piece of oral tradition gathered by the doctor Juan Bethencourt Alfonso in the nineteenth century, according to which the brother and heir of the king of Adeje was called Izora and lived here.¹ Whether Izora was a person or the name of a district, the coincidence is striking.¹

The landscape explains how people lived. Most of the archaeological sites found in surveys of the municipality lie on the slopes of the big ravines, Tágara-Guía, Tejina, Rodrigo, Chabugo and Erques, close to water.¹ On the coast, the evidence suggests seasonal camps for herding, shellfish gathering and fishing. Seasonally the flocks went up to the high pastures of Las Cañadas, where archaeologists have excavated six huts on the mountain of Chasogo, at almost 2,000 metres, used in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and a quarry where Guanche craftsmen roughed out hand-mill stones on the slopes of Cruz de Tea, at 2,200 metres, leaving 91 unfinished millstones behind.¹

Some finds are exceptional. In 1960, while clearing land to build a reservoir at El Campanario, a landowner found two staffs and three shepherds' crooks of wood hidden in a small cave. A burial cave at Majagora, discovered in 1974, held the remains of some 35 people, one of them a man with a wooden spear point still lodged in his spine. In a lava tube at Arenas Negras, in the pine forest of Chío, two newborn babies were found in 2018; one has been dated to the first half of the fifteenth century, a few generations before the conquest.¹ In November 1980 two brothers from Aripe reported engravings of human figures on a rock near their village: it was the first discovery of rock art in Tenerife, and it was followed by many more. In the coastal survey of 2005, a third of the 107 sites recorded were engraved rocks.¹²

A village around a church

After the conquest the land was granted to settlers in the usual way: in 1507 a spring "at Tejina in Adeje, with its caves, for your flocks" was granted to Fernando Guadarteme.³ The village of Guía grew, like so many in the Canaries, around its first church, which documents place at least in the first half of the sixteenth century; it was enlarged in the eighteenth century and much transformed in the nineteenth and twentieth.² Its patroness is Our Lady of the Light, whose image is attributed to the sculptor Fernando Estévez of La Orotava, the author of the Virgin of Candelaria venerated today.⁴ Most of the houses of the historic centre, protected as a historic ensemble, date from the nineteenth century, in eclectic and neoclassical styles.²

Higher up, the hamlets of Chirche and Aripe, between 700 and 900 metres, preserve the farming landscape of the island's southern slopes. They grew from the second half of the seventeenth century as homes for herders and farmers, built on the sites of older Guanche settlements, with cisterns, water channels, wine presses and cellars around modest houses; both are protected as historic ensembles.² In the same century the lord of the neighbouring Valle de Santiago, Fernando del Hoyo, included the hermitage of Our Lady of the Rosary at Tejina de Isora among the chapels under his patronage.²

Isolation and emigration

For centuries Guía de Isora was one of the most remote places on the island. Archaeologists note that the distance and isolation of the municipality lasted until roads were built in the 1930s.¹ Like many islanders of his time, the painter Manuel Martín González, born in Guía de Isora, emigrated to Cuba as a young man; he came back in 1932 and later painted two large murals for the new basilica of Candelaria.⁴

Down on the coast, Playa San Juan and Alcalá kept their fishing boats, and luxury hotels and golf courses now stand near Abama and Alcalá.⁵ At Abama, in 2001, an emergency excavation ahead of a golf course found the remains of a hut at the mouth of a ravine.¹ The old village of Guía, high above them, has kept its church, its square and its nineteenth-century houses.²