The Guanche Mummies

Long before Spanish ships reached the Canary Islands, the Guanche people had built a civilisation in near-complete isolation for over a thousand years. They mummified their dead with a sophistication that continues to astonish researchers, and yet the origins of this culture remain largely unknown.

This documentary follows a five-year forensic investigation conducted between 2015 and 2020, drawing together some of Spain's leading doctors, geneticists, archaeologists, and historians. More than twenty Guanche mummies were subjected to advanced radiological imaging, DNA analysis, carbon-14 dating using particle accelerators, forensic reconstruction, and ultraviolet light examination. The results shed new light on a people who left no written record.

At the centre of the film is the best-preserved Guanche mummy in existence, recovered from the Barranco de Herques in the eighteenth century and held in Madrid's National Archaeological Museum. Through CT scanning and forensic sculpture, the documentary reveals, for the first time, the face of this individual. The film also pursues the mythical Cave of a Thousand Mummies, an archaeological site long sought but never found.

Directed by Regis Francisco López and produced by RTVE and Story Producciones, the film is a serious, rigorously researched portrait of a civilisation only beginning to be understood.