Mixing It Up in the Canary Islands

Mermaids of the Canary Islands

The Brown Girl mermaids in this lovely painting reflect a true cultural crossroads of all of the interesecting cultures that populate The Canary Islands. The Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago, consist of 7 islands in the Atlantic Ocean located just off the NW coast of mainland Africa 100 km west of the disputed border between Morocco and the Western Sahara. With a Canarian population of a little over 2 million (of which over 1.5 million are Canarian-born and close to 200,000 of which are from the Spanish mainland), the cultural mix includes foreign residents that are Portuguese, Italian, Flemish, German, British, Colombian, Venezuelan, Cuban, Argentinian, African and Moroccan. How about that for mixing it up? ;-)