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Tenerife's history is extremely colourful and dates back for several millennia. The islands are estimated to be 30 million years old, relatively young by geological standards. Their existence was known, or at least postulated, in ancient times, and in his dialogues Timaeus and Critias, Plato spoke of Atlantis, a continent that had sunk beneath the ocean floor in a great cataclysm that left only the peaks of its highest mountains above the water. Whether Plato was being allegorical is uncertain, but the islands gained an almost mythic reputation, passed down from one classical writer to the next, as a Garden of Eden. This also fits in with the islands' latter day nickname, the Fortunate Islands. There is no evidence, despite all the purple prose, that the Phoenicians or Greeks ever landed in the Canaries.

Carbon dating has placed the earliest settlement at around 200 BC, although earlier settlement is possible. It was long suggested that Cro-Magnons, the Neolithic predecessor of Homo sapiens, first inhabited the Canaries, although that is not generally thought to be the case now. One clue, apart from the ancient skulls of the original inhabitants, is the conquering Europeans' 15th century descriptions of locals. Mainly on Tenerife, they found tall and powerfully built people with blue eyes and long fair hair. These people called themselves Guanches, from guan, 'man', and che or achinch meaning 'white mountain', in reference to the snow-capped Teide volcano. Suggestions for the origins of the Guanches have ranged from Celtic immigrants from mainland Spain or Portugal, to Norse invaders, supplying a possible explanation for the blonde hair and blue eyes. Berber immigrants from nearby Saharan Africa almost certainly inhabited some of the eastern islands, and place names bear a striking resemblance to Berber tribal languages. Occasionally blue eyes and fair hair crop up among the Berbers as well, so the Guanches' origin is still open to question.

By the time the Europeans began looking around the islands in the Middle Ages, they were inhabited by a variety of tribes often hostile to one another. Tenerife alone was divided into no fewer than nine tiny fiefdoms. The Guanches relied on limited farming, herding, hunting and gathering, and the majority of them lived in caves. The first vaguely reliable account of a landing by Europeans comes in the late 13th or early 14th century, when the Genoese captain Lanzarotto Malocello came across the island that would later bear a version of his name: Lanzarote. A host of dreamers looking for the legendary Río de Oro (River of Gold) that many thought flowed into the Atlantic at about the same latitude as the Canaries, missionaries bent on rescuing souls and slavers looking to fill their holds passed by or came to stay, but it took a Portuguese-Italian mission of 1341 to finally put the Canaries on the map.

The first Europeans to attempt to conquer the Guanches were Normans from France in 1402, and the final campaigns more or less ended in 1495 under a Galician soldier of fortune. The century saw massacres, warfare and Guanches sold off wholesale into slavery, and within another century their language had all but disappeared, and the survivors had intermarried with the invaders, converted to Christianity and taken Spanish names.