In the mountainous heart of Gran Canaria, where ravines carve their way through steep cliffs, the history of the ancient Canarians whispers enigmas that still resonate today. For centuries, the echoes of their rituals and sacred sites have mingled with the wind that whips through the peaks. But a recent discovery, the result of the tenacity of historians and archaeologists, promises to shed light on one of the most fascinating chapters of their spirituality: the rediscovery of Umiaga, an ancestral place name that designates not just a point on the map, but a sacred territory in the Amurga massif. The person who has best studied this entire process in the south is Tirajana researcher Pablo Guedes González*.
González Guedes recalls that it was in 2019, while historian Jesús Álvarez Pérez was digitizing old documents from the Tunte Parish Archive, when a word resonated strongly: Umiaga. Up to seven references to this place name, with its variants, emerged linked to ancient "apañadas" (livestock gatherings) and the steep "riscos" (crags). Led by archaeologist Marco Antonio Moreno Benítez, the research soon linked this documentation to the formidable northern area of Amurga, on the cliffs that extend from Los Sitios de Abajo to El Ingenio, just beyond Risco del Drago, the highest point in the area (1131 m), where the Fortress and the Almogarén of Amurga stand, already known to the Archaeology Commission of the Museo Canario.
But Umiaga, according to Álvarez and Moreno's interpretation, is more than a physical enclave. It is a "consecrated territory," a space defined by its topography and dotted with religious sites: small bowls, turrets, and rock carvings. A landscape where every stone, every nook and cranny, was part of a vast open-air sanctuary, possibly extending several kilometers southward, reaching places like El Gallego, El Galgar, and Mojón de Afón. Even the enigmatic turrets of El Coronadero, perhaps delimiting an ancient right of asylum, could be part of this vast sacred network, a hypothesis that connects with previous research and, for historian Pablo Guedes González (author of the research we are analyzing), draws the outline of the Tirajana sanctuary that archaeology is seeking.
The chronicles of the Conquest, although written by outsiders through their own Eurocentric and often Catholic fundamentalist lenses, agree on one crucial point: the ancient Canarians venerated two main sacred mountains, to which multitudes made pilgrimages. Names like Tirma and Tirajana (or Umiaga/Jumiaia) appear repeatedly. But where were these mountains really? Alonso de Palencia, chronicler of the Catholic Monarchs, describes in 1491 a raid on Tirajana, a "small mountain village." His account of a "Battle of Tirajana" mentions a "castle-like" temple on the summit of a "mountain" that was accessed on horseback—a key detail in ruling out places like the Fortress of Santa Lucía or Ansite, which are inaccessible to cavalry.
Other sources, such as Abraham Cresques's portolan chart of 1375, with its two prominent mountains to the south and southwest of the island, suggest that Mallorcan evangelizers and navigators were already aware of the importance of these geographical points. This chart, loaded with information about navigational hazards, may also have recorded the location of these spiritual centers, so vital to the Canarians.
As time passed, new voices joined the story. At the beginning of the 16th century, Fray Juan de Abreu Galindo placed Umiaga in Risco Blanco and described rituals involving offerings of milk and butter, dances, and songs around "boulders." Later, the Telde physician Tomás Arias Marín de Cubas, with access to lost manuscripts and the oral tradition of indigenous descendants, offered us the most detailed description at the end of the 17th century: an "Almogaren de Jumiaga" on a "high cliff," with "three braziers" for burning offerings, an altar of large stones, and a "chapel-like structure" within a large enclosure.
Intriguingly, Marín de Cubas mentions "sacarrones" or "zancarrones" in this chapel, a term that, analyzed with the semantics of the period, could refer to mummies or human remains venerated on pilgrimage. This fits with the Canarian custom of guarding their saints and reinforces the idea of these places as centers of worship and memory. The chronicles also speak of "fenced walls" that delimited a zone of immunity or asylum for people and livestock. A sacred right that protected those who came to these mountains.
Pablo Guedes González's work, presented at the Canarian-American History Colloquium, not only sheds light on the possible location of Umiaga, but also invites a profound reinterpretation of ethnohistorical sources. It reminds us that the history of the ancient Canarians is a complex mosaic, where each new fragment, be it a forgotten toponym in a parish archive or a linguistic reinterpretation, brings us closer to understanding a world of beliefs and rituals that, in the peaks of Amurga, still await full discovery.
