TENERIFE, May 9 — Way, way out in the Atlantic Ocean, at a point where one of Earth’s four cold water currents meets the searing African desert winds, nights are dark as prehistory. Once the sun sets on the volcanic archipelago known as the Canary Islands, a misty net of extraterrestrial white light blankets the sky from horizon to horizon. Until dawn, every ray of visible starlight in the entire Northern Hemisphere and much of the Southern Hemisphere gathers overhead. That sprawl of sky over a small island speck on the black ocean suggests, like few other experiences, the nanosecond that is human life.

Such black nights and clear skies have beckoned astronomers to install some of the world’s most powerful telescopes on volcanic peaks in this archipelago off the northwestern coast of Africa. As scientists use these state-of-the-art observatories to search out signs of the Big Bang, at sea level 8,000 feet below, tens of thousands of mostly British pensioners and brides-to-be on “hen parties” are getting drunk and sunburned.

Five million tourists annually visit this Spanish territory from colder climes to bask in Europe’s only subtropical weather. The port at Tenerife, the largest island, is the third-most-visited cruise ship destination in Europe.

Behemoth floating parties disgorge thousands of passengers daily in wintertime, the high season. Most of them are oblivious to the fact that they have just disembarked on an island with three official Unesco-sanctioned Starlight Reserves — locations where efforts are being made to fend off light and air pollution to protect access to starlight. Only a small percentage of tourists make the two-hour nauseating and twisting ascent to the telescopes — giant, bulbous white towers, perched at the windy top of Mount Teide.

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That may be about to change. Astrotourism is already a component of the Canaries’ booming tourism industry, drawing about 200,000 visitors annually. But with the 2014 designation of the islands as part of a larger EU SkyRoute itinerary for visitors, and the creation in 2011 of a music and astronomy festival, Canarian officials believe more star trekkers will soon be taking the winding drive up the mountain at dusk to sit on what might be called one of nature’s sky-decks.

A travel group visits the observatories on Mount Teide on Tenerife, in Spain’s Canary Islands April 3, 2016. — Picture by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
A travel group visits the observatories on Mount Teide on Tenerife, in Spain’s Canary Islands April 3, 2016. — Picture by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Island officials and the Spanish government are trying to cement the islands’ reputation as a key destination for both amateur and professional astronomers. In 2007, scientists and policymakers from some 50 countries met on the smaller island of La Palma for the first International Conference in Defence of the Quality of the Night Sky, producing a declaration on “protecting the sky as a basic right for all humanity.”

Among other matters, they discussed outlawing light pollution in La Palma, home to the world’s largest optical telescope at the Roque de los Muchachos observatory. The island happens to be the second-best location for infrared and optical astronomy in the Northern Hemisphere, after Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii, according to astronomers.

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The Canary Islands telescope sites are run by astronomers at the Institute of Astrophysics in Tenerife, a local research organisation that operates the European Northern Observatory. The islands have also hosted telescopes from 28 nations over the last few decades.

La Palma, population 70,000, is home to a large colony of scientists and the remnants of a 1960s German commune, and it is also a tiny centre for astrotourism. The economy revolves around astronomy, and besides the telescope and research centre, there are 13 sky-viewing points on La Palma. Vacationers can even rent telescope-equipped holiday houses and sip a vintage called “stellar wine” from local grapes.

By day from some points near sea level on Tenerife, one can see the white columns of the telescopes perched miles high on the old volcano. Researchers use them to look back in time at starlight generated millenniums ago and to advance humanity’s developing perceptions about space and time.

Gran Telescopio de Canarias, part of the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma in Spain’s Canary Islands April 1, 2016. — Picture by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Gran Telescopio de Canarias, part of the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma in Spain’s Canary Islands April 1, 2016. — Picture by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Impulses both earthly and intellectually sublime coexist easily on the Canary Islands. The British lose their stiff upper lip in the Canaries faster than you can say Spanish sun, and a British television documentary called “OAPs Behaving Badly” recently reported that so many British retirees party hearty in the bars that one of the spots is known as “God’s Waiting Room.” Establishments like Bonker’s Bar, China’s White Bar, the Down Under Bar, the Drunk-N-Duck Bar and the Dubliner hold down the wilder end of the Canarian amusement spectrum. For the sober set, there are dozens of golf courses irrigated with desalinated water.

Tenerife’s astrotourism lure was bumped up in the past few years with the Starmus Festival, headlined by the likes of the late US astronaut Neil Armstrong and other stars of the space world. In the fall of 2014, in a vast conference hall in the Ritz Carlton’s Abama resort, a terra cotta red Moorish-styled compound, Garik Israelian, a Canarian astrophysicist, stood before 600 science aficionados from all over the world, with music from Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon blasting from speakers all around.

A few hundred yards away, the Atlantic crashed into jet-black rocks and split the blazing afternoon sunlight into spray diamonds, but down in the conference room, travellers from as far away as Canada and China couldn’t have cared less about sun and sea. Everyone had their iPhones aimed at the wheelchair mounted with a black Intel laptop that almost obscured the small, slumped figure of Cambridge physicist and best-selling author Stephen Hawking.

Hawking, along with Brian May of the band Queen, who earned a doctorate in physics from the Canary Islands astrophysical institute after recording Another One Bites the Dust and other rock anthems, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and several astronauts, was among the headliners at the second Starmus Festival in 2014, the pet project of Israelian.

Israelian is a rocker-scientist who had his own punk band and studied astrophysics in Armenia before emigrating to Spain with his family in the 1970s. He moved to Tenerife and began researching supernovas at the observatories — with Pink Floyd, Peter Gabriel, Brian Eno and other ‘70s rockers blasting on his earphones.

Clouds stretch away below the summit of Roque de los Muchachos, on La Palma in Spain’s Canary Islands April 2, 2016. La Palma is one of world’s best-situated locations for astronomy, and its many telescopes have become a destination in their own right in the tourist-saturated Canaries. — Picture by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Clouds stretch away below the summit of Roque de los Muchachos, on La Palma in Spain’s Canary Islands April 2, 2016. La Palma is one of world’s best-situated locations for astronomy, and its many telescopes have become a destination in their own right in the tourist-saturated Canaries. — Picture by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

The islands are essential to extraterrestrial exploration now, but they played a key role in earthly exploration as well. Columbus “discovered” them in 1492, that banner year in the human enterprise of looking beyond. Drifting down the coast of Africa before steering west to discover the Americas, the explorer dropped anchor and fuelled up on fresh water and fruit here.

The islands were not exactly new to mainland Europeans when Columbus arrived. The origin of their name is the Latin word for dog — cane — possibly because, as ancient Roman author and naturalist Pliny the Elder wrote, early Roman visitors to the islands encountered huge dogs. The small tropical birds we call canaries, native to these islands and others, are named after the islands — not the other way around.

But when Columbus dropped anchor, the islands were still inhabited by a tall, white-skinned people called the Guanches. They lived in the mountain caves, wore goatskins and mummified their dead in the Egyptian fashion. Teide, capped with snow in the winter, and the island’s name, Tenerife, are both words that come from the indigenous people’s name for “white mountain.”

On the nearby island of La Gomera, schoolchildren are still taught an indigenous whistling language that those inhabitants of the island used to communicate over distances before the arrival of the telephone.

But other than those few words and traditions, for the lost goatskin-wearing natives, Columbus’ arrival heralded the end of language, culture and time. Within two years of the explorer’s stopover, the Spaniards had colonised the islands and eradicated the Guanche, selling the survivors as white slaves on the Continent. What remains of them today are some of their names, like Teide, and words for some of the flowers that grow only along its rocky ridges.

Mount Teide on Tenerife, in Spain’s Canary Islands April 3, 2016. Teide is a Unesco World Heritage site and also a designated Starlight Reserve, an asset that increasingly draws astronomy-minded visitors up from the busy tourist port of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. — Picture by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Mount Teide on Tenerife, in Spain’s Canary Islands April 3, 2016. Teide is a Unesco World Heritage site and also a designated Starlight Reserve, an asset that increasingly draws astronomy-minded visitors up from the busy tourist port of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. — Picture by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

After Columbus, great German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt landed here in the 18th century and explored the islands, identifying one of the four cold water currents in the world drifting past the islands, which partly accounts for the near-perfect weather. The sky is literally cloudless 90 per cent of the year.

While one side of Tenerife is grey rubble, the islands are mostly fertile, producing kiwi, bananas, mangoes, apples, tobacco and wine. Tenerife is filled with microclimates, green toward the north and barren to the south. In winter, it is possible to swim at the beaches and, an hour later, ascend the volcano and stand in 3 feet of snow.

The islands’ bounty and idyllic — and strategic — location made them a colonial prize by the 18th century, and it was here that the Spaniards shot off Adm. Horatio Nelson’s right arm with a cannon while defending Tenerife against the British Navy in 1797. He survived and went home with a condolence prize of casks of sweet Canarian wine, for which the British developed a taste that has not abated to this day. George Washington supposedly toasted the revolution with a glass of it.

For modern-day American visitors, the Canary Islands resemble the Caribbean but possess facilities and characteristics of Europe — hospitals, low crime, relatively high standard of living, Spanish culture and healthy, delicious food (great tapas, olive oil, indigenous white goat cheese and a local delicacy, “wrinkled potatoes” boiled in salted water until the water evaporates). But the chief difference between Tenerife and, say, Aruba or the Bahamas is the island’s role in international space endeavours.

Israelian conceived Starmus, the island’s science and rock festival, in 2011, and its name is short for “star music.” The concept of music from stars — unlike the medieval “music of the spheres” — actually has some basis in science, and Israelian has made a study of it.

The natural pools at Charco Azul, a destination on La Palma in Spain’s Canary Islands April 2, 2016. — Picture by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
The natural pools at Charco Azul, a destination on La Palma in Spain’s Canary Islands April 2, 2016. — Picture by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

“When the first sound waves were detected in stars, about 10 years ago, I realised this whole new branch of astronomy was starting,” he said. “We have tools to detect those sound waves. They are low frequency infra-sounds. The timbre is different, but I can take the sound... and I can move it to our domain, so we can hear it. It’s playing the piano, 10 octaves down.”

Israelian, who is compiling a library of the star sounds, likes to think big (he’s working on projects to help Armenian and other orphans in Syria).

In the autumn of 2014, at the second Starmus, he had 600 attendees, a repeat attendance by Hawking, and the participation of the local government and tourism agencies. Israelian plans a third, even larger Starmus festival from June 27 to July 2 this year devoted to discussion of the search for life in the universe.

“The only place and best place to do something like this is here,” he said. “In one hour, we can get a bus and get to a star party with the biggest telescope in the world, at night. There is no place on the planet where you can do that.”

Hawking is again expected, along with 10 Nobel laureates, a gaggle of US and Russian astronauts, and Neil deGrasse Tyson, the US astrophysicist, author and television personality, a rock star himself. — The New York Times

Black cliffs tower over the shore north of Los Gigantes on Tenerife, in Spain’s Canary Islands April 1, 2016. — Picture by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Black cliffs tower over the shore north of Los Gigantes on Tenerife, in Spain’s Canary Islands April 1, 2016. — Picture by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times