Right next to TEA is the Museum of Nature and Archaeology. As our relative decides to visit another more classical art museum we enter the archaeology museum however we have on a tight timeline, we can spend only about an hour inside. And we really want to see the Guanche mummies we heard so much about. But first we get a geology lesson explaining how the Canary Islands were created.
In fact it feels we are going through the whole history of the island with the endemic animals, birds and plants and then another exhibit showing how people arrived on the island and how they were motivated by multiple economic and political reasons.
And then the exhibits start to touch on the human inhabitants, with Roman and Greek classical objects found in the area, we didn’t really expected that for whatever reason.
As we approach more current eras there are more and more items but somehow we cannot see any mummies, we are afraid that we might have missed them.
However the exhibits are quite interesting and we enjoy to see the culture and how the Guanches lived before the Spanish arrived in the 15th century.
There is a whole section showing the model replicas of the most famous archaeological sites on the islands with some actual petroglyphs from different sites along the island.
There is also a copy of the most famous statue in the Canary Island of a fertility goddess or that is what we assume it is, quite similar to what we saw in Cyprus the previous year.
And then we find the mummy section. There are quite a few of them and mostly well preserved, it is interesting to see how many parts of the world have mummies even though only the ones in Egypt are well known.
And now it is time to run to meet our relative but at least we are running through the nature section seeing sharks and dolphins and huge squids as we make our way to the exit to then go back downtown to find our relative.
