A wealth of cultural history to be uncovered in the islands

Visit Candelaria on the east coast of Tenerife and you may run into a posse of tough-looking men, stripped to the waist and armed to the teeth. Happily, they're harmless. Cast in bronze, they're big statues of the Menceys – warrior chiefs who ruled the island's earliest known inhabitants, the Guanches.

It's thought that the Guanches, a race of tall, fair-haired individuals, rafted across to the Canaries from North Africa a little over 2,000 years ago. As they weren't great seafarers, they ended up settling in permanent, separate communities on each of the seven islands. They were herdsmen who lived simply, dressing in goatskins, sheltering in caves and making pots.

Fierce though their statues may look with their hook-ended spears and obsidian daggers, the Menceys were unable to resist Spanish conquest. Large numbers died in battle between 1402, when the Spanish-sponsored adventurer Jean de Béthencourt made his first forays on Lanzarote, and 1496, when the last Guanche stronghold, Tenerife, fell. Many more were wiped out by another curse of colonialism – diseases.

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Enough aboriginal women survived to permit the present-day Canarians to truthfully call themselves part-Guanche, part-Spanish. But Guanche traditions fared less well, largely wiped out by culturally assertive conquerors who endowed the islands with elegant mansions and busy ports. Our knowledge of the Guanche way of life is largely scraped together from recent archaeological discoveries. They appear to have had sophisticated beliefs in worlds beyond our own: their traces include worship-related petroglyphs and figurines. Particularly intriguingly, they left behind pyramids and mummies.

A new attraction near Los Abrigos in southern Tenerife has brought the Guanches back to life. A guided tour at the San Blas Reserva Ambiental brings you face to face with aboriginal herdsmen, played by actors, who conjure up the past by blowing on conch shells, grinding maize and whittling tools. They also hang fish up to dry – just as the islanders still do in remote villages such as Caleta del Sebo on Isla de la Graciosa, north of Lanzarote.

The setting for this re-enactment is impressively authentic – a swath of ancient, weathered lava, where rock formations in the shape of giant ocean waves loom over caves and gullies. The area had been earmarked for a golf course, but when surveyors discovered Guanche tools, necklaces and pottery, the owners opted for preserving the site more or less intact as an environmental reserve, and building the rather gorgeous five-star San Blas eco-resort (00 34 902 108 926; sanblas.eu) on its coastal fringe. As well as its tours of the reserve, the resort features an education centre where multimedia presentations offer compelling images of exploding volcanoes and hard-working early islanders.

It's all likely to whet your appetite for a deeper investigation into Canarian prehistory. The Museo de la Naturaleza y el Hombre (00 34 922 535 816; museosdetenerife.org; open Tue-Sun 9am-7pm; €3, free on Sun) in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, is an excellent place to start. It's famous for its Guanche mummies, which are extremely rare. The Guanches were as skilled at embalming as the ancient Egyptians, but the horrified conquistadors destroyed as many mummified bodies as they could find. Some Guanches wrapped their dead in goatskins and placed them in caves to dessicate; others treated them with "dragon's blood", the dark red resin of the startlingly primeval-looking dragon tree.

Tenerife is also home to the grandest of Guanche remains, a complex of stepped lava-stone pyramids preserved within the Parque Etnográfico Pirámides de Güímar (00 34 922 514 510; piramidesdeguimar.net; open daily 9.30am-6pm; €10.40). The precise origins of the Güímar pyramids are hazy, but they're aligned with the sun at the summer and winter solstices, suggesting great ceremonial significance. If you've seen the pyramids on Mauritius, prepare yourself for a shiver of déjà vu – the similarities are uncanny. The Güímar pyramids have a Mesoamerican tinge, too, and have caused many an expert to speculate upon unknown connections between far-flung indigenous peoples.

On Gran Canaria, the Museo Canario (00 34 928 336 800; elmuseocanario.com; open Mon-Fri 10am-8pm, Sat-Sun 10am-2pm; €3) offers a feast of all things Guanche. Here, mummies lie in tortured-looking poses, skeletons dangle within glass cases, and row upon row of skulls stare out from shelves. For a break from the more morbid displays, it's worth seeking out the soothingly geometric aboriginal cave paintings copied from the island's famous Cueva Pintada de Gáldar.

To unravel a few of the mysteries of the Mahos, Fuerteventura's Guanche community, it's worth dipping into the Museo Arqueológico de Betancuria (00 34 928 878 241; open Tue-Sat 10am-6pm), the tiny archaeological and ethnographic museum in Betancuria, the prettiest of Fuerteventura's highland villages.

Elsewhere on the islands, Guanche culture lives on in scattered fragments, but you need to know where to look. Place names such as Gáldar and Güímar are Guanche. A few aboriginal surnames survive, and fashionable Canarians name their daughters Arminda or Dácil after Guanche princesses. As a spoken language, Guanche has been extinct for a couple of centuries, but there's an echo of it in Silbo, the Gomeran habit of communicating in whistles. Guanche dances and martial arts are popular, too: tajaraste dances receive an airing at traditional festivals, and ancient styles of stick-fighting and wrestling have become national sports.

But you may prefer to sample a few traditional dishes to provide a few clues into Guanche tastes, such as gofio, which is made by toasting maize and grinding it into flour. It's a versatile, ingredient that is used to thicken soups and stews, coat chunks of goat's cheese, and is made into porridge, sweets and even ice cream. The islands' best chefs are giving gofio-based dishes a contemporary twist: indulge yourself at Mesó*el Drago (00 34 922 543 001; mesoneldrago.com) in Tegueste, Tenerife or La Tegala (00 34 928 524 524; lategala.com) in Mácher, Lanzarote.

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