Five Years’ Stay in the Canary Islands

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Literature · Subcategory: Literary fragments · Year: 1884-1888 · Authors: René Verneau

René Verneau (La Chapelle, 1852–Paris, 1938) was one of the many travelling scientists who visited the Canary Islands, leaving us in his writings a clear vision of the Islands. A physical anthropologist and recognised scientist among European academic circles, Verneau carried out numerous archaeological excavations and anthropological studies here in order to analyse the similarities between the island aborigines and the Cro-Magnon man, a species of Homo Sapiens that inhabited Europe during the Upper Paleolithic, between 45,000 and 10,000 years ago, whose remains were discovered in 1868 in the Cro-Magnon rock shelter, located in the Dordogne region in south-west France.

René Verneau, after completing his university medical studies at the Sorbonne specialising in prehistoric anthropology, was assigned in 1876 by the French Ministry of Public Instruction to the Canary Islands to study the past of the island aborigines. This first stay lasted two years, although it was between 1884 and 1888 that he wrote in detail his most important work Five Years’ Stay in the Canary Islands , originally published in 1891 in Paris, in which the author documents his expedition and investigations, also giving a raw view of what he saw, as the positivist he was.

He describes the city of Santa Cruz as hot, boring and ugly, but without disdain or sarcasm. Let us see how he analyses what a traveller might find in the rooms of its inns and hotels; not sparing detail regarding the local gastronomy: 

“The main houses of the city are grouped around the Plaza de la Constitución, near the pier, and on Castillo street. In the same square there are two Spanish hotels with patios full of palm trees, banana plants, bougainvillea and a thousand other plants. At first glance, these inns look quite nice, but appearances can be deceptive. The rooms are full of mosquitoes and fleas that seem to torment newcomers. During the night, clouds of those horrible cockroaches imported from America run along all the walls, and here the climate has suited them so well that they have multiplied in size.

What finally made me loathe the Spanish inns of Tenerife was the food. All year round you are condemned to eat fried eggs, fish and meat as tough as a shoe sole. At night, the menu is no more varied and the eternal stew is never missing. This stew is a real medley, made up of meat, chickpeas, cabbages, potatoes, sweet potatoes, beans, pumpkin, bubangos, etc. This list, which may seem fantastic, is not complete, as you have to have eaten this stew, enriched with plenty of rice, to get an idea. Perhaps things have changed since my stay in this city. New hotels have opened and competition may have rescued the old innkeepers from their clumsiness.”

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