First References and Contact
The earliest known references to the Canary Islands are thought to have been in some of Plato 's writings (428-348 BC) where he refers to Atlantis, a continent sunk beneath the ocean floor in a cataclysmic event which left only the highest mountains above the sea. Subsequent Classical writers built on this notion, creating a legendary garden of Eden and even identifying the islands as Elysium - the place where the virtuous would go in their afterlife, an assumed source of the tags Fortunate Islands or Blessed Islands that have sometimes been used to refer to the Canary islands. But though this early body of Classical writing seems to suggest references to the Macronesia islands (the Canaries, Azores, Cape Verde and Madeira), there is no evidence that either the Phoenicians or Greeks ever landed in the Canaries. The first real, if questionable, evidence of contact between the islands and the outside world came four hundred years after Plato's writings. In an account of a fleet serving King Juba II , the Roman client king of Mauritania, it would appear that the ships might well have weighed anchor on one of the Canary islands, probably Gran Canaria, in 40 BC, though many of their observations of the island seem inaccurate. However, fragments of amphorae found on some of the islands suggest at least a fleeting Roman presence at some point and certainly, by the time the Greek geographer Ptolemy (c. AD 100-160) drew his well-respected map of the world the islands were included on it - the western tip of El Hierro marking the edge of the known world. The first reliable account of European contact came in the early fourteenth century, when the Genoese captain Lanzarotto Malocello was blown off course in 1312, landing on  © 2003 by Rough Guides Ltd. as trustee for its Authors. Published by Rough Guides. All rights reserved. Rough Guides name is a trademark of Rough Guides Ltd. Buy the book here!
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- and ultimately lending his name to - the island of Lanzarote. Making the most of his accidental visit, the captain whiled away twenty years on the island before returning to Europe, causing a Portuguese-Italian mission to set out in 1341 and finally confirm the island's place on the world map. News of the discovery quickly spread, and it was not long before the curiosity of missionaries and slave raiders was aroused, precipitating regular visits by both throughout the rest of the century.
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