CANARY ISLANDS, SPAINFrom the cliffside path that leads down to the sea, about four kilometers away, I come to a halt. This is the spot: a cave, its entrance barely visible. I look up at the looming face of the rock. I sense it staring back at me, beckoning with its stash: hundreds of caves, built over the centuries from the lava flows of Mount Teide. Any one of them could be the cave we’re looking for—here, history has not yet been written.
Within this gorge in southern Tenerife, the largest of Spain’s Canary Islands, a stunning cave was found in 1764 by Spanish regent and infantry captain Luis Román. A contemporary local priest and writer described the find in a book on the history of the islands: “A wonderful pantheon has just been discovered,” José Viera y Clavijo wrote. “So full of mummies that no less than a thousand were counted.” And thus the tale of the thousand mummies was born.
