Pyramids of Güímar

Overview

The Pyramids of Güímar are six stepped, terraced platforms of dry-stacked lava stone in the Chacona district of Güímar, on the southeast coast of Tenerife. They were built in the 19th century as part of the island’s cochineal trade, they reach 12 m at the tallest, and there were once nine of them. Nothing here is ancient, and knowing that before you buy a ticket changes what you get out of the place.

What you are actually paying for is a park rather than a monument. The Parque Etnográfico y Jardín Botánico Pirámides de Güímar covers more than 64,000 m² and was set up in 1998 by the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl, who wanted the structures protected from a housing plan; it has held botanical garden status since 2017 and has been part of the European museum network NEMO since 2018. The pyramids themselves take twenty minutes. The themed walking routes, the gardens and four indoor exhibitions are what fill the rest of the visit.

Go for the gardens, the odd 19th-century engineering and the Heyerdahl story, and you will have a good couple of hours. Go expecting an archaeological site and you will feel short-changed, because the ground under the stones has been dug and dated and the answer is not the one the branding implies. The park is easy with children, flat enough in most places for wheels, and it is one of the few attractions on Tenerife that works just as well in cloud as in sun.

History

Chacona was farmland. Clearing volcanic ground for cochineal cultivation in the 1800s meant lifting an enormous quantity of loose lava rock, and the local practice was to stack it into rectangular terraced piles at the edge of the plot. Six of those piles survive at Güímar out of nine, and structures built the same way with the same materials exist at other sites on Tenerife.

That is the boring version, and it is also the one the evidence supports. Between 1991 and 1998, archaeologists from the Departamento de Prehistoria of the Universidad de La Laguna excavated the site with Heyerdahl’s agreement. A ground-penetrating radar survey guided eight trenches of 25 m² each, dug down to bedrock, and they found three sediment layers. The pyramids sit stratigraphically on top of the lowest of them, which means they cannot be older than the 19th century.

There is genuine pre-Hispanic material on the site, and it is worth being precise about what it proves. Beneath Pyramid 1 runs a volcanic tube, the Cueva Chacona, which had been walled up. Inside it archaeologists found Guanche pottery, tools and organic remains, with radiocarbon dates between 680 and 1020 AD. The cave predates the pyramids by roughly a thousand years and sits below them. It tells you Guanches used this patch of ground. It tells you nothing about who stacked the stones on top.

Heyerdahl’s interest is the reason the site exists as a visitor attraction at all. He raised the money to save it from development with backing from the Canarian shipping businessman Fred Olsen, and the 65,000 m² around the pyramids opened to the public once the excavations finished in 1998. He also never accepted the dating, and kept arguing to the end of his life for a link between the structures and pre-Hispanic Tenerife. Some of that framing still runs through the signage and the museum, so read the panels with one eyebrow up.

The one strand of the mystery that survived peer review is astronomical. In 1991 Juan Antonio Belmonte Avilés, Antonio Aparicio Juan and César Esteban López of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias showed that the long sides of some of the terraces mark the solstice directions: the main retaining wall points at the summer solstice sunset, and the stairs on the western faces line up with the winter solstice sunrise.

Visiting

The park is at Calle Chacona, s/n, 38500 Güímar, signposted from exit 22 of the TF-1 motorway, and it opens daily from 10:00 to 18:00 except 1 January and 25 December. There are two car parks, one at the main entrance and one on the north side of the site. Booking ahead is not required for a normal visit, only for guided tours and large groups.

Which ticket

Three self-guided tiers, all bought at the gate or through the official shop at tickets.piramidesdeguimar.es. Basic entry is €12.50 and covers the six pyramids, the museum, the auditorium, the outdoor routes, the Sustainable Garden and the plastics exhibition, with a suggested minimum of an hour. Full entry is €18.00 and adds the Poison Garden, the Polynesia rooms and the Tropicarium when it is open, minimum two hours. Full entry with an audio guide in seven languages is €26.00 and the park suggests two and a half hours for it.

A guided tour costs €22.50 for one hour with a certified guide and takes in the museum, the auditorium and the panoramic terrace, covering the competing theories about the structures and Heyerdahl’s part in the story; afterwards you carry on alone through the basic-entry areas. Tours run in Spanish, English and German, and this is the one thing worth reserving in advance.

The route on the ground

The six terraces are the first thing you reach, and the walk around them is open and flat. From the panoramic terrace you get the stepped profiles side on, which is the only angle at which they read as pyramids rather than as walls. The Cueva Chacona lies under Pyramid 1 and is interpreted rather than entered.

The museum sits in Casa Chacona, a 19th-century Canarian house on the site. Its rooms cover Heyerdahl’s argument for contact between ancient civilisations, a photographic survey of step pyramids elsewhere in the world, the construction detail of the terraces and the scientific work done on the complex and the cave. Two more exhibitions sit nearby: a pair of shows on Rapa Nui and the settlement of the Pacific produced by the Mata Ki Te Rangi foundation from Easter Island, and Un Océano de Plástico, which the park describes as Spain’s first permanent exhibition on plastic pollution of the oceans.

Outside again, the Sustainable Garden recreates the watercourse of a Canarian barranco and stocks it with European eels, the only fish found in fresh water in the Canaries; it was built with the Universidad de La Laguna and the Fundación Neotrópico, and the park won Turismo de Tenerife’s general sustainable tourism award in 2021 for this kind of work. The Tropicarium is a working research collection of orchids and insectivorous plants rather than a display, so it is normally shut; ask at reception, because small groups are occasionally let in. There is also a sensory path where the surfaces are meant to be walked barefoot.

The Kon-Tiki café and the bazaar sit in a public zone outside the ticket line, so you can have a coffee with the pyramids in view without paying to go in. Brunch is served there daily from 11:00 to 13:00, in an adult and a children’s version, and is sold as a €18.50 add-on through the ticket shop. Shaded picnic areas mean you can equally bring your own food.

Tips

• Buy the basic €12.50 ticket unless the Poison Garden is the reason you came. It already includes the pyramids, the museum, the auditorium, the outdoor routes and the plastics exhibition, and the jump to €18.00 mainly buys you the poisonous plants and the Polynesia rooms.

• Ask at reception about the Tropicarium as soon as you arrive rather than when you reach it. It is a laboratory, it is usually closed, and access when it happens is by small group at set times.

• Around the summer solstice the park runs an evening event to watch the double sunset, where the sun drops behind one summit, reappears and sets again behind the next. Capacity is limited and the dates and times only go out on the park’s social media during June, so check then rather than in advance.

• Wear proper shoes and bring a hat and sun cream. Almost everything here is outdoors on volcanic ground, and the park says so itself in its own visitor advice.

• Dogs are allowed, one per adult, under the park’s own rules. That is unusual for a Spanish museum site and makes this an easy stop if you are travelling Tenerife with a dog in the car.

• Coming by bus from Santa Cruz de Tenerife, lines 120 and 128 run to Güímar directly. From the south of the island take line 111 to the Güímar stop and change to the 120 for the town centre.

• If reduced mobility is a factor, the park states that its facilities are adapted and that it can supply accessible itineraries; the address for specific questions before you travel is on the visitor page.

• The café and shop are outside the paying area, so a stop here works as a coffee break on a drive along the east coast even if you skip the park entirely.