La Gomera is the second-smallest and third least populous of the Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago. Marked by craggy volcanic mountains, banana trees, dense forests of ferns, and moss covered trees, it looks like the land that time forgot.

It also has a language that consists entirely of whistles.

The language is called “Silbo Gomero.” Long before Spanish settlement, it was originally used by the Guanches, the aboriginal people of the Islands who used it to communicate across hills, valleys, and ravines. Though the Guanche language died out around the 17^th century, the whistling endured and was widespread as late as the 1940s and 50s. Today, it’s a phoneme substitution that emulates Spanish phonology through a reduced set of whistled phonemes. In 2009, UNESCO declared it to be a part of the Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. Intangible, maybe, but one study showed that silbo is recognized in the “language center” of the brain by silbo whistlers. Regular Spanish speakers who aren’t whistlers just recognize it as whistling.

By the 1970s and 80s, there were only a few whistlers remaining, but at the end of the 90s there was renewed interest in silbo, in part because of an initiative to make it a compulsory subject at primary school:

Admittedly, this has been an unusual segue into a brief discussion of a breed we nearly lost, but we couldn’t resist sharing Silbo Gomero with you, and the handsome breed that was developed at a nearby island.

The Garafian Shepherd is native to northern La Palma, another of the Canary Islands (which, by the way, were named after canines, not canary birds).  The dogs that are used to watch over grazing stock started out as an amalgamation of three other breeds that arrived on La Palma to work as sheepdogs at different times in their history. Those breeds are believed to have been the Cão da Serra da Estrela Portuguese, the Belgian shepherd, and native dogs that had belonged to the Auaritas, the aboriginal people of La Palma.

Resulting dogs bred true because functional selection was carried out by shepherds who used the dogs to protect and herd local goats called Cabra Palmera. Garafians had to be able to move over great distances on the rugged terrain of the island, and for long durations. As such, the dogs had to be agile, adaptable, intelligent, and assured. They also had to be good with other dogs and with children.

While links to the Collie aren’t recorded, the breed is sometimes called the Spanish Collie, and it came very close to disappearing because of interbreeding with other herding breeds during the 60s. A fourth cross made in the 1970s with German Shepherd Dogs nearly did the breed in. Offspring were restless, jittery dogs that stressed the sheep with bites to force them to move, and stressed animals stopped giving milk.

It was not a good blend.

It became very apparent that the Garafian Shepherd needed an intervention. A working group for the recovery of the Garafian Shepherd was created. It would become the Spanish Association of the Garafian Shepherd Dog, and from the few pure specimens kept by the island’s shepherd, the breed was saved from vanishing.  Presently, the breed is abundant on the island,  and its future looks promising. In 2003, it was officially recognized by the Real Sociedad Canina de España.

Image of a Garafian Shepherd by Gemeinfrei, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1618676