GUANCHES, GUANCHIS or GUANCHOS (native Guanchinet; _Guan_=person, _Chinet_ = Teneriffe,--"man of Teneriffe," corrupted, according to Nunez de la Pena, by Spaniards into Guanchos), the aboriginal inhabitants of the Canary Islands. Strictly the Guanches were the primitive inhabitants of Teneriffe, where they seem to have preserved racial purity to the time of the Spanish conquest, but the name came to be applied to the indigenous populations of all the islands. The Guanches, now extinct as a distinct people, appear, from the study of skulls and bones discovered, to have resembled the Cro-Magnon race of the Quaternary age, and no real doubt is now entertained that they were an offshoot of the great race of Berbers which from the dawn of history has occupied northern Africa from Egypt to the Atlantic. Pliny the Elder, deriving his knowledge from the accounts of Juba, king of Mauretania, states that when visited by the Carthaginians under Hanno the archipelago was found by them to be uninhabited, but that they saw ruins of great buildings. This would suggest that the Guanches were not the first inhabitants, and from the absence of any trace of Mahommedanism among the peoples found in the archipelago by the Spaniards it would seem that this extreme westerly migration of Berbers took place between the time of which Pliny wrote and the conquest of northern Africa by the Arabs. Many of the Guanches fell in resisting the Spaniards, many were sold as slaves, and many conformed to the Roman Catholic faith and married Spaniards. Such remains as there are of their language, a few expressions and the proper names of ancient chieftains still borne by certain families, connect it with the Berber dialects. In many of the islands signs are engraved on rocks. Domingo Vandewalle, a military governor of Las Palmas, was the first, in 1752, to investigate these; and it is due to the perseverance of D. Aquilino Padran, a priest of Las Palmas, that anything about the inscription on the island Hierro has been brought to light. In 1878 Dr R. Verneau discovered in the ravines of Las Balos some genuine Libyan inscriptions. Without exception the rock inscriptions have proved to be Numidic. In two of the islands (Teneriffe and Gomera) the Guanche type has been retained with more purity than in the others. No inscriptions have been found in these two islands, and therefore it would seem that the true Guanches did not know how to write. In the other islands numerous Semitic traces are found, and in all of them are the rock-signs. From these facts it would seem that the Numidians, travelling from the neighbourhood of Carthage and intermixing with the dominant Semitic race, landed in the Canary Islands, and that it is they who have written the inscriptions at Hierro and Grand Canary.