There were seven Canary Islands. At least, that is what the official maps said.
For centuries, sailors and cartographers insisted there was an eighth. They called it San Borondón.
It would appear on the horizon, its mountains and ravines clearly defined. Then, without warning, it would vanish. No landing was ever confirmed.
The legend of San Borondón begins in the sixth century, with a monk named Brendan of Clonfert who set sail from Ireland in search of an earthly paradise.
According to tradition, after a long voyage, he reached a green and fertile island where the sun never set. He celebrated Easter Mass there, but midway through the ceremony, the island began to tremble. It was not solid ground at all — it was the back of an enormous whale. The crew fled to the boats just in time.
The story was passed down orally for generations. Over time, it settled on a specific spot in the Atlantic, west of the Canary Islands. That is how San Borondón came to be, its name a corruption of Brendan.
An Island That Made It Into an International Treaty
Remarkably, the legend did not stay confined to folklore.
The island appears on the Hereford Mappa Mundi, produced in England around 1280. It is also shown on the 1367 chart by the Venetian cartographer Pizzigano and on Toscanelli’s map of 1476.
In all, it turns up on at least a dozen maps, the last of them Gautier’s from 1755.
But the most striking detail is this: in 1479, Castile and Portugal signed the Treaty of Alcáçovas to divide up their spheres of influence in the Atlantic. In that document, San Borondón is mentioned as part of the Canary Islands. A phantom island had been written into a real diplomatic agreement.
A Century of Sightings
The year with the most recorded sightings was 1570, when dozens of sailors swore they had seen it, their descriptions strikingly consistent: pine forests, bluish mountains, deep ravines.
Several expeditions set out specifically to find it, but none found any land where the island was said to be.
The friar and historian Juan de Abreu Galindo, writing in the 16th century, went so far as to calculate its position: roughly 340 miles northwest of El Hierro and about 137 miles southwest of La Palma.
A precise location, by his account. The only problem was that the island was never where it was supposed to be.
Sightings of San Borondón grew rarer over the centuries, but they never stopped altogether.
On Aug. 10, 1958, the Spanish newspaper ABC published a photograph taken by Manuel Rodríguez Quintero in September 1957. It showed a jagged landmass on the horizon, near La Palma. The headline left little room for doubt: the wandering island had been photographed for the first time.
Decades later, in 2003, a group of witnesses claimed to have caught the island on video. In 2008, the footage was posted on YouTube, billed even more boldly as the first recording of San Borondón in nearly 1,500 years of legend.
What Science Says Today
The modern explanation is far less magical.
At the coordinates where San Borondón is said to lie, there is no submerged island and no trace of volcanic activity that could have raised land at any point in recorded history. There is no geological evidence of any kind.
Experts point to a simpler cause: mirages.
Low-lying cloud formations, combined with layers of air at different temperatures, can create silhouettes that convincingly resemble mountains. In many cases, what people see is actually a distorted image of La Palma itself, seen from another island under certain atmospheric conditions.
Where to Look for It
The legend lives on in Canarian culture, and it even has a place of its own: the Mirador de San Borondón, in the municipality of Tazacorte on La Palma. From there, on hazy days or when low clouds settle over the sea, silhouettes that look remarkably like an eighth island still appear on the horizon.
You do not need to believe the legend to appreciate the place. The lookout offers a spectacular view of the Atlantic in its own right. And knowing the full story — the maps, the treaty, the 1957 photograph — turns any sunset there into something more than the end of another day.
San Borondón has never appeared in a satellite image.
But for centuries it lived in the minds of sailors, cartographers, and kings. That blend of science, faith, and mirage may be precisely what keeps it alive to this day.
