Description
The “Pirámides de Güimar” Ethnographic Park and Botanical Garden is an open-air museum that includes six stepped pyramids, oriented towards the position of the sun on different key astronomical dates. The Park, twice nominated for the Award of European Museum of the Year, includes several outdoor routes and specialised gardens, among which the “Poison Garden” stands out. These gardens are distributed in more than 64,000m2. Moreover, it is one of the five botanical gardens in the Canary Islands. You just can’t miss it! In 1991, Belmonte, Esteban and Aparicio, researchers of the Astrophysic Institute of the Canaries, discovered that the main complex of the Pyramids of Güímar was astronomically oriented. These complex points, on the one hand, to the summer solstice sunset and, on the other hand, to the sunrise on the day of the winter solstice. They also discovered the phenomenon of the "double sunset" on the day of the summer solstice: the Sun first hides behind a ledge on the edge at the Pedro Gil crater, reappears for a moment after going over this ledge to finally hide at the bottom of the crater. Solstitial orientations led some people to believe that the Pyramids were ancient temples. The Norwegian researcher Thor Heyerdahl studied the pyramids and according to his theory, they cannot be random piles of stones. The material used for the construction of the pyramids are not stones from nearby fields, but lava rocks.