You arrive expecting pyramids.
What you actually find on the hillside above the town of Güímar on Tenerife is something more complex. A landscaped park unfolds between the volcanic slopes and the Atlantic Ocean. Stone terraces rise in geometric steps from the ground. Around them are botanical gardens, exhibition halls, and displays about ancient voyages across the world’s oceans.
Somewhere inside all of this lies one of the most peculiar ideas from one of the most remarkable and controversial explorers of the twentieth century: Thor Heyerdahl, and his theory about the oceans as highways between civilizations.
A Norwegian thread in an unexpected place
One of the small pleasures of travel is discovering how often Norwegian history appears far from Norway itself.
In this case the connection leads directly to Thor Heyerdahl, one of the most famous explorers of the twentieth century. Visitors to Oslo encounter his story at the Kon-Tiki Museum on the Bygdøy peninsula, where the original raft from his legendary Pacific expedition is displayed. His work belongs to the same broader tradition of exploration that includes figures like Fridtjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen.
The famous Norwegian explorer is more often associated with the Pacific than with the Canary Islands. But in the 1990´s, just a few years before the old explorer left on his final voyage — he died in 2002 — Thor Heyerdahl dug out pyramid-like constructions from the ground beneath Güìmar.
Stone terraces on the hillside
The terraces of Güímar consist of six stepped structures built from dark volcanic stones. They resemble small pyramids, with clearly defined levels and flat platforms on top. The stones are carefully arranged without mortar, forming regular shapes that stand out in the landscape.
Local farmers had known about these terraces for generations. In a volcanic environment full of loose rock, clearing land for agriculture often meant stacking stones into piles or terraces.
For most archaeologists, this explanation seemed entirely sufficient.
But when Thor Heyerdahl visited the site in the early 1990s, he saw something that looked different. To him the structures appeared too orderly to be accidental. Their shape and layout suggested deliberate construction.
Heyerdahl’s Atlantic vision
Heyerdahl had spent much of his life challenging conventional ideas about the limits of ancient navigation.
In 1947 he crossed the Pacific Ocean on the balsa-wood raft Kon-Tiki, demonstrating that simple vessels could travel thousands of kilometers across open water. Later he built the papyrus boats Ra and Ra II to test whether ships modelled on ancient Egyptian designs could cross the Atlantic.
These expeditions were not intended to prove that such voyages had happened, but to show that they were possible.
The terraces of Güímar seemed to fit into the same broader vision. Heyerdahl believed they might represent evidence of ancient maritime connections between the Mediterranean world, North Africa, the Canary Islands, and perhaps even the Americas. The islands lie only about one hundred kilometers from the African coast, and in his view they could have served as stepping stones for early Atlantic exploration.
He also suggested that the structures might align with the position of the sun during the summer solstice, hinting at astronomical knowledge among their builders.
For Heyerdahl, the Atlantic was not an empty barrier separating continents. It was a corridor along which ideas, people, and technologies might once have travelled.
Archaeologists remain skeptical
Most archaeologists, however, interpret the terraces very differently.
The prevailing view today is that the structures were built in the nineteenth century as a result of agricultural activity. Farmers clearing volcanic fields often stacked stones into terraces or boundary walls. Over time these piles could develop surprisingly regular forms.
Excavations at the site have revealed little evidence of prehistoric construction. No tools, artifacts, or cultural layers clearly connect the terraces to ancient builders.
From this perspective, the pyramids of Güímar are not ancient monuments but the unintended by-product of farming in a landscape full of stone.
The debate has never entirely disappeared, but the archaeological consensus remains firmly on the side of the agricultural explanation.
A park devoted to exploration
Regardless of their origin, the terraces eventually became the center of a remarkable cultural project.
With the support of the Norwegian shipping family Fred. Olsen, Heyerdahl helped establish the Ethnographic Park Pirámides de Güímar in the 1990s. The site opened to the public in 1998 and has since developed into a museum dedicated to human migration, exploration, and cultural contact across oceans.
Visitors encounter exhibitions about ancient navigation, models of vessels such as Kon-Tiki and Ra II, and displays exploring pyramidal architecture in different parts of the world. Botanical gardens introduce plants from the Canary Islands and other continents, reflecting the global themes that fascinated Heyerdahl throughout his life.
In a curious way, the park sometimes feels less like a monument proving a theory and more like a museum devoted to the idea behind that theory.
An explorer in his later years
When Heyerdahl became involved in the Güímar project, he was already an elderly man and an international celebrity. He died in 2002, only four years after the park opened.
Some critics felt that his later ideas became increasingly speculative. Yet the intellectual impulse behind them remained the same one that had driven his earlier expeditions: a deep curiosity about how human beings moved across the world long before modern technology made global travel routine.
Even those who disagreed with his conclusions often acknowledged that Heyerdahl had a rare ability to ask bold questions.
Between history and imagination
Standing among the terraces today, the discussion about their origins still lingers in the air.
Are these structures ancient monuments aligned with the sun, or simply the orderly remnants of nineteenth-century agriculture? The archaeological evidence strongly favors the latter explanation. Yet the site continues to fascinate visitors.
Perhaps that is part of its charm.
The pyramids of Güímar occupy a space somewhere between archaeology, exploration, and imagination. They remind us that our understanding of the past is always evolving — shaped by evidence, interpretation, and occasionally by the bold hypotheses of explorers who were willing to look at familiar landscapes and see something entirely different.
For visitors to Oslo, Heyerdahl’s story begins at the Kon-Tiki Museum on Bygdøy. But in an unexpected way, it also continues here, on a volcanic hillside overlooking the Atlantic.
