Jessica Duncan Smyth is not the first woman known to have climbed Mount Teide. According to Canary Island historians she may have been preceded by a Scottish lady whom they simply refer to as Mrs. Hammond, believed to have crossed paths on the volcano with another expedition organised by the Prussian geologist Leopold […]

     According to modern weathermen this past winter in the Canary Islands was the dullest in terms of prolonged low temperatures, as well as the driest for seventeen years. But, sheltering from the mid-day sun under a nispero or loquat tree in my garden, just inland from the northern shores of Tenerife, I can […]

Looking back on things, or remembering epic or even minute historical events and the reasons they came about is never a waste of time. Indeed past moments are always worth reflecting upon as they can often explain the present. To the Canary Islander, whose known history dates just over six hundred years, any event, however […]

     When he arrived on the island of Tenerife in 1826, The Blind Traveller was forty four years old and already one of Britain’s most widely travelled personalities. But he was no ordinary voyager for James Holman, the fourth son of an English chemist from Exeter, was completely blind. He also suffered from debilitating pain […]

Like many other travel authors of his time Harold Lee placed the Portuguese Madeira archipelago and the Canary Islands into one area of study. Both groups of Atlantic islands form part of Macaronesia, the Islands of the Fortunate or μακάρων νῆσοι makárōn nêsoi, as ancient Greek geographers referred to them. But there was another, more practical explanation for […]

As we prepare for this New Year’s Eve celebrations, with hope for better tides glistening on the horizon, I can’t help wondering what Mr Mackay or even the valiant Captain James Cook might think were they able to take a peep beyond the 18th century.  You see, there is a magnificent, restored property, hidden now […]

His name was George John Scarlett Graham-Toler and in time he became one of a number of travellers from the British Isles who left their mark in Tenerife in the best kind of way. Not only was he an old school gentleman, which is always appreciated.  He was also a philanthropist and always gave something […]

In 1620, a group of Puritans, better known as the Pilgrim Fathers, sailed across the Atlantic Ocean from the English port of Plymouth on a square-rigged brigantine called The Mayflower.   The Mayflower It was another Mayflower which sailed to Tenerife in 1776. Her master was Pleford Clark, an experienced seaman. She weighed 150 tons […]

Farrow Siddall Bellamy became one of the most distinguished and yet least remembered of those pioneering Victorian visitors who left their mark on the island of Tenerife. He was born in 1865 at Belton, in the Isle of Axholm part of Lincolnshire and first came to live in the Canary Islands at the age of […]

Just over a century and a half ago, in 1859, Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution with compelling evidence in On the Origin of the Species by Natural Selection. His interest in natural evolution had gown as a result of his five year voyage of natural exploration around the world aboard H.M.S. Beagle. Charles Darwin joined […]