Gustavo Sanchez Romero

Gustavo Sánchez Romero was born on Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Tenerife, Canary Islands, in November 1972. He holds a B.Sc. in Biology (minor in Geology) from Western Michigan University, USA, 1994. He also holds a M.Sc. in Museum Science and Cultural Management from la Laguna University, Tenerife, 2014. In March 2020 he completed a 50-hour introductory course on Canarian Archaeology, Universidad de las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Canary Islands.

Gustavo has been interested in the archaeology of the Canary islands, and specially on Guanche culture, since childhood, after receiving from his parents a series of popular books, and graphic novels, on these topics. Since then he has acquired specialized monographs and classic texts, both in English and Spanish, about the ancestral inhabitants of the Canarian archipelago, the Guanches. These were northern Africa Amazigh clans, mainly from Tunisia, Morocco, Mauritania or Libya, that established themselves on the islands since, approximately, one millennia BC.

Driven by this profound interest, he has been exploring many “off the beaten track” archaeological sites on the island (and others), basically photographing and documenting them, specializing, in a way, on the step pyramids that can be found in many corners of the Canaries. Some of his Guanche discoveries, and part of his research, have been published at the Almogaren, the archaeological publication of the Vienna based Institutum Canarium. The IC was founded in 1969, and has acquired considerable renown as an international and interdisciplinary scientific society dealing with the cultural history of the Canary Islands, and the adjacent Mediterranean. Gustavo´s work has been published in the International Journal of Modern Anthropology. He also has a keen interest in animal legends and mythical creatures, and lives in Icod de los Vinos, northern Tenerife.