Guanche

The Guanche were the indigenous people of the Canary Islands, an Atlantic outlier of the North African Amazigh world who reached the islands in the first millennium BC and lived in stone-age isolation. Each island went its own way, Tenerife split among kingdoms ruled by menceyes.

Their Berber-related language was first recorded in a numeral list by Nicoloso da Recco in 1341. They held that the demon Guayota haunted Teide's peak, and Tenerife islanders embalmed their dead as cave mummies. Sustained contact began with Jean de Béthencourt's Castilian expedition, which took Lanzarote and Fuerteventura in 1402.

The other islands resisted for nearly a century: Tenerife's Guanches destroyed a Castilian army at Acentejo in 1494, before the rout of Bentor, mencey of Taoro, in 1496 ended the last independent kingdom. War, enslavement and disease broke them; survivors merged with Spanish settlers and their language died out in the seventeenth century, though La Gomera's whistled Silbo survives.