Northern Lights

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Memory · Subcategory: Sites of memory · Year: 1770

The northern lights are a wonderful celestial spectacle full of light and colour that occurs at night when charged particles of energy originating from the Sun, solar wind, reach the atmosphere of our planet, accelerating and heading towards the poles due to the Earth's magnetic field. There, at great height, electrons collide with oxygen and nitrogen molecules, greatly increasing their energy and emitting in this process a bright and undulating light, similar to the fluorescent or neon lights of signs. The phenomenon is known in the northern hemisphere as the northern lights; in the south, as the southern lights. 

The chances of seeing northern lights in the skies of the Canary Islands are very slim due to the low latitude of the Archipelago; even so, there are scientists who say that the phenomenon could occasionally and infrequently appear in the skies of our islands when solar activity is sufficiently intense.

And it must have been in the winter of 1770 when we know of the most spectacular sighting of the northern lights seen in the Canaries of which we have news. It occurred exactly on the night of 18 January 1770 when over the sky of the Anaga mountains and visible from both Santa Cruz and La Laguna, a huge reddish light with hardly any movement was seen after nightfall that lasted several hours. The authorities, at first, thought that what they were seeing was the consequence of some fire in the local mountains, so they even sent inspection squads to the Anaga point to see what was happening there.

Some enlightened people of the time immediately realised what was happening and both José de Viera y Clavijo, in a document kept at the Museo Canario de Las Palmas, and the councillor and writer from La Laguna Lope Antonio de la Guerra in his memoirs, left a record of what they saw in the clear sky of Anaga that cold night in January 1770.

De la Guerra describes it as follows:

<On 18 January shortly after an hour after sunset a rumour spread in this City that perhaps a fire had started in the Taganana Mountains, considering that part of the sky appeared extremely inflamed, red, and bathed in a brighter glow; but, having been observed with some attention, it was recognised as a Northern Light. The night, although cold, was serene, the clouds were quite scattered, the inflammation and blood-red colour extended over the entire northern part from the east to some degrees beyond the west with a truly very bright light, but nothing tumultuous, agitated, or flickering. This illumination, having begun to extinguish in spots, was almost entirely gone by 12 o'clock. Nevertheless, it caused extraordinary fear in some populations of the island, some considering that a fire had started nearby, for which explorers went out, and others considering it was fire from Heaven striking down because of our faults, with this concern some made a solemn vow to His Majesty Sacramented and other different works and acts of piety were performed .>

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