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 Tinerfe el Grande emerges, 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 pacifier of Tinerfe is equivalent to that attributed to legendary and historical figures from other cultures, such as the Yellow Emperor, Huangdi, or Narmer, unifier 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, a rebellious 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 Guanche rebels, 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. .
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 sorrow 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 invocation of The Incarnation. The second is a 126 centimeter 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.
In 1745, Magdalena Luisa de Llarena y Viñas, Marquise of Adeje, commissioned the drafting of the Book of Miracles of Our Lady of the Incarnation, as well as Mayordoma and Waitress of the Virgin, a text that would come to replace a lost first book. The document was concluded in 1752 and includes 23 prodigies, of which a dozen are cures 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 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 carried that night in their hands, 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 got up healthy with bullets in their hands, they gave others 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 shouted loudly calling for Our Lady of the Incarnation, and they also declared that some saw, in the most dangerous and strong part of the battery, a beautiful woman and others a bird or dove and that all understood that It was Our Lady of the Incarnation whom they invoked since they went to sea”. Declaration signed by several informants, taken on January 24, 1746.
CANYONS, WITCHES, LIGHTS AND APPEARANCES
Undoubtedly, the Barranco del Infierno is the space for legend and mystery most representative of 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 Bailadero de las Brujas warns us about how this place was a refuge for ancestral ceremonies and cults, possibly linked to the search for fertility and health, conserving in popular memory a second similar toponym. connotation, El Bailadero, located at the bottom of the ravine. 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 for mystery. This is the case of the so-called Casa de la Era or del Cabrero, 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 the one that the ancient canaries called evil creatures that they described as enormous black dogs with burning eyes.
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 around and made all kinds of turns and speed changes.
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 it is the true image that appeared and was known by 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 her in sacred spaces such as the cave of Achbinico or San Blas, under the name of Chaxiraxi, translatable as “the one that holds the firmament”, being related in recent decades to the astral cults of the Canopus star. 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. Paradoxically, the altarpiece in which the image of Adeje is shown is the original that the Virgin had in 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. It is speculated without documentary basis that the marquisate was the custodian of this secret, which would explain the protection he exercised over this devotion, the commissioning of the copy and supposed exchange with the original, and the presence of decorative elements that are at least peculiar 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.
