El Teide, Sacred Volcano

Caldera de Las Canadas

The summits of Tenerife were formed one or two million years ago by now vanished volcanoes. More than 500,000 years ago a massive landslide destabilized them, and created La Orotava Valley, that stretches all the way down to the ocean. Then, around 170,000 years ago, another massive collapse crashed the summits down towards the sea, forming the huge basin (17 km in diameter) that is today Caldera de Las Canadas. Since then, volcanic activity continuing into the present has slowly filled the caldera. The Caldera has been a national park since 1954, presided over by the volcano El Teide. Teide rises to the highest point in Spain, 3,717.98 meters.

The aboriginal Guanches (approx. 4th c. AD-15th c. AD) raised livestock, and in search of pasture land, took their flocks to these summits during the summer. They used their faithful dogs to look after the herds. The dogs were even buried with them. Other archeological remains attest to their seasons among the volcanoes: huts, burial grounds, mummies, funerary utensils of obsidian and ceramics. They considered El Teide to be their Axis Mundi. It held up the sky.

It was also the sacred site of battles between the gods:

"Guayota appeared and captured Magec, the sun, leaving the sky in darkness...Guayota, with Magec his prisoner, hid in the bowels of Echyde (Teide). Achaman sought him there. And when he found him, the ground opened with thundering booms and tremors. From the crater of Echeyde, Guayota hurled smoke, burning rocks, slabs and boulders, burning clots. He also threw tongues of lava and streams of slag. The air and sky turned into a boiling quagmire, so ablaze with burning coals that it caused terror, until Achaman finally defeated him. As punishment for his wickedness he was locked forever inside of Echeyde." --fragments of the legend of Guayota

El Teide

Later, after the conquista by the Spanish, El Teide became a mandatory passage for scientific expeditions sailing to the New World. The only subtropical mountains in Europe, their flora and fauna are unique.

On the road to Teide we drove north, always upward, to where trees no longer grow. We were in the volcano's realm. The view was obscured by a haze--attributed to the "calima", sand from Africa. There were clumping broom plants and puffs of a tiny yellow flower, but mostly the tougher silhouettes of the earth's ancient dramas. The craters of countless volcanoes spread their hardened lava skirts all around. Sometimes only the cores remained, scarred in narrow ridges, balancing on air in improbable shapes, since the once-molten minerals are so incredibly hard. Near and distant, the shapes surround you, jagged roques and slices of digues.

Las Roques

Las Roques is a conglomerate that looks like Monument Valley, twisted, once-molten rock, of volcanic cores like La Cathedral. Like the American Southwest, it is an environment of reds and purples and sage greens.

Then we drove to the teleferico, or cable car, that ascends Teide from a cabin-like building. The shop had fashion mannikins posing as Guanches, and a plethora of tedious trinkets.

From the teleferico

We rode up to the crater of Teide, watching the shape of the Caldera take form beneath us as it receded, swirls of red and green and dark purple gray lava fields. The flows of lava are broken into gigantic chunks, from an eruption that took place in the Middle Ages lasting several decades. Black lava was thrown out from El Teide up to the current level. It is said that Dante's Purgatorio is based on the eruptions of this island.

fumaroles

In 1798 was the last eruption in the park's interior. On the sides of Pico Viejo (2,994 meters), a volcano near El Teide, a series of mouths opened which are called the nostrils of the Teide which, during three months, released enormous quantities of lava that created the badlands (malpaises) in the park.

At the top the air was icy. Sulphurous fumaroles of heated fumes (indicative of continuing activity inside the volcano) became frosty in the wind. The atmosphere at 13,000 feet was rarefied and clarifying. We walked on a rough path of rock and boulder.

on the crater

I leaped from surface to surface in my Vibrams toward Pico Viejo, which posed for us, but was still many hours' hiking away. The lava was mostly of monumental blackish obsidian and basalt, smooth as a sculptor's work, harder than any rock. And then, exhilarated by the atmosphere but fearing the chill, we took the opposite rocky trail over the caldera, with its nooks and fumaroles and overlooks, till we longed to be back in the little cabin of the teleferico. There we could watch the rocks as we descended, with more of a feel for their daily lives.

Pico Viejo

We drove on, past gleaming white observatory buildings, that looked like mosques and temples. A world meteorological headquarters is here, where there is no pollution and little ambient light. The "Law of the Sky" made the Canary Islands Astronomical Observatories an "astronomical reserve." In 1979 the Observatories in the Canary Islands were internationalized, and now more than 60 scientific institutions (belonging to Armenia, Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, the US, Finland, France, Italy, Mexico, Norway, the Netherlands, Poland, the UK, Russia, Sweden, Taiwan and Ukraine) work here.

Door in the rock, Bosque de l'Esperanza

We drove past what appeared to be huge drifts of many colored sands shading to black, which were lava flows, past numerous volcano craters, on to the Carretera dorsal, the ridge of land crowned by the Corona pine forest high above cities on the coast.

We were soon among the towering pines and eucalyptuses of the Bosque d l"Esperanza, that roared with the hollow forest wind.  Franco had assembled his supporters before the fatal coup in that forest, so we duly relieved ourselves to express our opinion of Franco.

Then down to Candelaria, for the moist and balmy ocean air. We still wanted to see the interior of the Basilica, with the famous doll--the statue of the Virgin who had washed ashore 100 years before the Spanish, and supposedly been worshipped by the Guanches--and the high altar with its monumental El Greco-like paintings. In the sunset, the surf pounded and foamed against the old Guancha chiefs, standing in bronze at the edge of the Atlantic.