The Museo de Historia de Tenerife occupies the Casa Lercaro, a 16th-century merchant's palace that is one of the best examples of Canarian domestic architecture in the islands. The building itself — two storeys around an internal patio, with elaborately carved wooden galleries — is as interesting as the collection it houses. The Lercaro family were Genoese merchants who made their fortune in the Canary Islands trade and built this house accordingly.
The museum collection traces the history of Tenerife from the Guanche indigenous period through the Spanish conquest to the 20th century. The Guanche material — carved stone objects, ceramic vessels, and the remarkable collection of mummies and skeletal remains from the pre-colonial burial caves — is sobering and fascinating in equal measure. Later rooms cover the colonial economy (sugar, wine, cochineal dye), the relationship with the slave trade, and the history of emigration from the islands to Latin America. Well-curated and not overwhelming in scale.