The legends and mysteries of Tenerife are numerous. The Adeje of the Guanches was a territory that tradition indicates as a reservoir of the highest power on the Island, as well as the scene of the epic attempt to reverse the unstoppable subjugation of the indigenous population that accompanied the Conquest of Tenerife.
It is in Adeje where the figure of the mythical Tenerife the Great, a character described as the last great mencey of an island that, a century before the arrival of the Castilians, appeared unified and at peace. This role of unifier and peacemaker of Tinerfe is equivalent to that attributed to legendary and historical figures from other cultures, such as the Yellow Emperor, Huangdieither narmerunifier of Lower and Upper Egypt as well as founder of the First Dynasty.
Mythical or real, the truth is that, according to tradition, the social order linked to this Great Mencey crumbles after his death, fragmenting the island into nine menceyatos, leaving Adeje in the hands of the nobleman Atbitocarpe. But Pelinor will be the last mencey of this lineage, a tribal leader who chose not to show resistance to the plans of the conqueror Alonso Fernández de Lugo, accepting to be baptized under the name of Don Diego de Adeje.
There would still be time for other characters surrounded by epics to burst into the history of Adejera, as is the case of Ichasagua, an uprising Guanche who led the most notable of the rebellions against the countless outrages committed or instigated by De Lugo. There is no doubt that such a leader must have existed, although his name and biographical details are not supported by sufficient evidence.
Tradition has it that in 1502 he was named Mencey by the insurgent Guanches, taking his own life in a ritual act of honor in the so-called Llano del Rey, upon discovering the betrayal of some of his allies and the irreversible nature of the new established social order.
Legends and mysteries of Tenerife: Virgen de la Encarnación, the marvelous protector and miracle worker
Adeje has one of the oldest Marian devotions in Tenerife, the result of a precocious and providential appearance on its shores. The original image appears in the vicinity of what would eventually become known as Cruz del Humilladero, in La Enramada, being stolen and taken to Garachico. Tradition narrates how the grief of the adejeros was comforted by “high disposition of Divine Providence”mediator in the appearance in the same enclave of a second image, this time under the title of La Encarnación.
The second is a 126 cm tall dress image. A cave and a first hermitage served as a temple, until it was moved towards the last third of the 16th century by Pedro de Ponte to the hermitage, now a parish church, of Santa Úrsula. All the experts agree in indicating the place of the apparition as a Guanche cult space that was used to introduce the new Christian faith.
Magdalena Luisa de Llarena y Viñas, Marchioness of Adeje, in addition to Mayordoma and Waitress of the Virgin, commissioned in 1745 the drafting of the Book of Miracles of Our Lady of the Incarnation, a text that will come to replace a lost first book. The document was concluded in 1752 and includes 23 prodigies, of which a dozen are healings and several respond to a list of generalities among which two aspects stand out: the strange change of color experienced by the face of The Incarnation, and the healing effects attributed to the oil of his lamp.
One of its most striking prodigies, which is part of the legends and mysteries of Tenerife, occurred on January 18, 1746, due to an attack by English pirates who had landed in the port of Los Cristianos. The Mayor, various soldiers and even the Marquesa herself testify about a truly picturesque sequence of events, in which at least a hundred witnesses sheltered in the church see how the image moves and its face shines, while the English besieged the coastal area for hours with a storm of bullets and shrapnel. With no castle and hardly any defense, the only victim seems to have been a rabbit!
“And taking the bullets to some the hats, to others the axes that they had in their hands that night, to others hitting them so close that the dust raised by the bullets blinded them, to others it passed through their legs and they fell as if deadened and then they they got up healthy with bullets in their hands, to others they gave pieces of cliffs that broke the bullets and when asked they answered happily that nothing had happened to them; and seeing these prodigies more and more they all cried out loudly calling for Our Lady of the Incarnation”.
Declaration signed by several informants, taken on January 24, 1746.
CANYONS, WITCHES, LIGHTS AND APPEARANCES
Without a doubt, if we talk about legends and mysteries of Tenerife, in this case in Adeje, the Barranco del Infierno is the most representative space in the municipality, a condition underpinned by its extraordinary beauty and suggestive corners, with water as a distinctive element. At its entrance the corner of the Dancer of the Witches warns us about how this place was a refuge for ancestral ceremonies and cults, possibly linked to the search for fertility and health, preserving in popular memory a second toponym with a similar connotation, The Dancerlocated at the bottom of the ravine.
Its very name evokes the disturbing way in which this place could be contemplated and respected for generations. Oral sources collected by Juan Bethencourt Afonso describe it as a place of execution, brewing in an indefinite moment a legend of love and betrayal that would be versioned and put on paper by Luis Salcedo in 1932. In it Xampó and Saure, sons of the Mencey, love to the same young woman, the beautiful and ambitious Iora, who despite maintaining a relationship with Xampó is tempted by Saure’s promises of power, to the point of becoming the executing hand that ends the life of the former.
However, the supernatural enters the scene at that fateful moment, emerging from the burning bowels of the abyss a Xampó turned into a stone giant, consummating his revenge by mercilessly crushing the traitors, and remaining as a vigilant stone landmark integrated to always in a ravine
We find in Adeje other spaces that are part of the legends and mysteries of Tenerife. It is the case of the call House of the Age either of the goatherd, a complex today in ruins located on the side of the TF-47 that for decades was considered a place of ghosts and fears. This condition meant that at nightfall few dared to walk through its surroundings.
One of the most peculiar stories that we have collected refers to the observation in the place of huge and robust black dogs, with a behavior different from that expected in a dog, which has led to linking such observations with the phenomenon of the tibicenas, name with which the ancient canaries called evil creatures that they described as huge, woolly, black dogs with burning eyes. They are, without a doubt, another of the legends and mysteries of Tenerife.
Finally, the local territory has not been immune to stories of wandering souls in pain, which take the form of night lights and travel through the most diverse landscapes. The best known of them was located along the peaks that cradle the ravines of Infierno, Agua and Fañabé, until it disappeared towards the coast. In the distance it was seen as one, sometimes several, balls of light with bluish-white tones, which fluttered and made all kinds of turns and speed changes along their vertiginous path.
LA CANDELARIA DE ADEJE AND THE LEGENDS OF THE STRONG HOUSE.
The carving of the Virgin of Candelaria that is preserved in the Church of Santa Úrsula Mártir has been, by far, the element that has generated the greatest heterodox debate in recent decades, a stage in which the belief – already documented at the beginning of the 20th century – that this is the true image that is showed up and they knew the Guanches, and not a copy as the official historiography maintains.
Chronicles tell that at least 100 years before the Conquest of Tenerife, at the same time that the first image appears in La Enramada de Adeje, the Guanches found in Playa del Socorro, on the coast of the Güímar Valley, the wooden carving of the Virgin of Candelaria.
They would worship him in sacred spaces like the cave of Achbinic or San Blas, under the name of Chaxiraxitranslatable as “the one that carries the one that has the world” either “the one that supports the firmament, being related in recent decades with the astral cults to the star Canopus. After many miracles, devotion and vicissitudes, a destructive storm would make her disappear, dragged into the sea on November 7, 1826.
Over time, the Marquises of Adeje residing in the Casa Fuerte became Patrons of the Providence of Our Lady of La Candelaria, as they appear in 1659, the family commissioning a copy that was made in view of the original. In a parish inventory of 1684, the existence of an image of Candelaria in Adeje appears, while 1765 is the year indicated by the art historian Jose María Mesa to date the commission of the aforementioned facsimile.
The truth is that today the date of its carving is still under discussion, especially when in 1990 a radiocarbon dating of the wood -not of the image- placed it between 1445 and 1637. That dating is incompatible with this image with the tradition that places the Virgin of Candelaria in Tenerife towards the end of the 14th century, to which should be added the differences that the carving presents with the descriptions of the original provided, for example, by Fray Alonso de Espinosa at the end of the century XVI.
Despite this, the belief that it is the original persists, a fact reinforced by curious episodes such as the one that occurred on the occasion of the festivities of February 2, 1827. That year the Dominican friars, the clergy and the Bishop borrowed the image to the Marqueses for the religious ceremonies of their festivity, since the venerated one in Candelaria had been lost months ago. The Marqueses refused, having to procession with a painting.
Did they do it because they understood that it was the original or perhaps due to disagreements that we do not know with the applicants? Paradoxically, the altarpiece in which the image of Adeje is shown is the original that the Virgin had in the temple of Candelaria until 1681.
To the land of heterodoxy also belongs the hypothesis that the image is a Templar black virgin, a representation that was part of the cult that the Order of the Temple professed to the sacred and ancestral principles of the feminine. Her defenders maintain that she arrived in Tenerife with the heirs of the Templars, encrypting the letters of her mantle a code that would have allowed her to navigate to America before her discovery.
In this scenario, it is speculated without documentary basis that the marquisate was the custodian of this secret, which would explain the protection it exercised over this devotion, the commissioning of the copy and the supposed exchange with the original, and the presence of at least peculiar decorative elements. in the Casa Fuerte and in the temple of Santa Úrsula. These elements, the stone heads and the geometric sgraffito, would be Hermetic symbols whose meaning would only be within the reach of initiates. Perhaps future research will shed a definitive light on these unorthodox accounts.
