Juan Núñez de la Peña (May 1641 – January 3, 1721) was a Spanish historian. Born in

San Cristóbal de La Laguna San Cristóbal de La Laguna (commonly known as La Laguna, ) is a city and municipality in the northern part of the island of Tenerife in the Province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, on the Canary Islands, Spain. The city is the third-most populous ci ...

, he studied

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

and the

humanities Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture. In the Renaissance, the term contrasted with divinity and referred to what is now called classics, the main area of secular study in universities at the t ...

in the college of San Agustín de La Laguna and was subsequently ordained priest. He worked in Toledo as a notary before returning to the Canary Islands. There he began to compile and preserve for posterity municipal, notarial, and ecclesiastic documents that allowed him to write a history of the islands, called ''Conquista y antigüedades de las islas de la Gran Canaria y su descripción, con muchas advertencias de sus privilegios, conquistadores, pobladores y otras particularidades en la muy poderosa isla de Tenerife, dirigido a la milagrosa imagen de Nuestra Señora de Candelaria''. This work was published in 1676, with a second edition with corrections published three years later. In it, he examined the

Guanche people The Guanches were the indigenous inhabitants of the Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean some west of Africa. It is believed that they may have arrived on the archipelago some time in the first millennium BCE. The Guanches were the only nativ ...

as well as the genealogies of the European families on the islands. For his work he was honored with a pension of 200 pesos and with the title of ''cronista general de los reinos de Castilla y León'' ("General Chronicler of the Kingdoms of Castile and León"). Although the first standard history his work was criticized by his successor as historian of the Canary Islands, the botanist priest José de Viera y Clavijo in his own history (1783).Benita Sampedro, Simon R. Doubleday ''Border Interrogations: Questioning Spanish Frontiers'' 2008 -Page 184 "Viera is referring here to his most distinguished predecessor among historians of the Islands, Don Juan Núñez de la Peña, who "unfortunately was one of those men lacking in sufficient instruction, without style, nor critique, nor any of the other ...... Núñez de La Peña's work is his Conquista, y Antigüedades de las islas de la Gran Canaria y su descripción (Madrid, ..."

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Nunez De La Pena, Juan People from San Cristóbal de La Laguna 17th-century Spanish historians Spanish genealogists 1641 births 1721 deaths