For the first time in my digital nomad life, I had a visit from my parents. It was wonderful to be able to show them around my home town of Las Palmas and explore the rest of Gran Canaria with them. However, while Las Palmas is a proper working Spanish city, I was unprepared for the south of the island. Of course, I knew it was going to be very touristy, but I didn’t realise I had to watch for unscrupulous people out to scam tourists. And we got caught up in a typical Canary Islands scam.
The Northern Route & the Guanches of Gran Canaria
Northern Gran Canaria is a leafy, mountainous landscape of craggy coastline, fertile valleys, deep gorges, and terraced hillsides planted with avocados, tomatoes, mangoes, figs and delicious little Canarian bananas. There are picturesque villages dotted around, their streets lined by colourful, colonial-style houses with traditional wooden balconies. Woven amongst this misty landscape, you can find evidence of pre-colonial Canarians, a cave-dwelling race of people known as the Guanches.
Gran Canaria is divided into a number of touring routes that visitors can take to explore the main sites on the island. Shortly after my arrival, I met up with a group of locals who were exploring Gran Canaria to see some of the Guanche sites on the Northern Route running between Agaete and Las Palmas. So I set off to see what I could discover about Gran Canaria’s aboriginal history and explore some of the archaeological sites in the north of the island.