Columbus slept here

Having finished with "canals" in my encyclopedia, I have now reached the Canary Islands.

There's a whole lot that I found interesting about these Spanish-owned islets off the African coast.

They were Christopher Columbus' last stop in the Old World before he sailed for America. A church stands on one of the islands in which he supposedly prayed before he left. (Though my web searching found info only about the Iglesia de Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion, which dates to 1516 and thus 24 years after Capt. Columbus first passed through. That's the photo that I have included, sadly, not of my own taking. Maybe someday.)

How about this from Wikipedia: The Gomerans (natives of one of the islands) have a unique way of communicating across the barrancos (valleys) by an amazing kind of whistled speech called Silbo. Silbo Gomero language, a whistled language, is an indigenous language, whose existence was known since Roman times. Invented by the original inhabitants of the island, the Guanches, Silbo was adopted by the Spanish settlers in the 16th century and survived after the extinction of the Guanches. When this unique medium of communication was about to die out early in the 21st century, the local government required all children to learn it in school.

And this:
Columbus stopped at Gomera for wine and water, intending to stay only four days. He became romantically involved with Beatrice de Bobadilla, Governor of Gomera, and he stayed a month. When he finally sailed she gave him cuttings of sugarcane, which became the first to reach the New World. The house in San Sebastián in which he stayed is now a tourist attraction.

This was going to be a blogpost about the "Columbian exchange." I'll get to that in a later post.