Seventy miles off the northwest coast of Africa, eight islands rose out of violent volcanic upheaval, and the landscape still shows it. Golden beaches give way to rainforest, rainforest gives way to black lava fields, and an entire continent's worth of climates and cultures fits into a handful of small islands few outside Europe can place on a map.

The first settlers paddled over from Africa roughly 2,000 years ago. Spain's conquest in the 1400s reshaped everything that followed, cementing Spanish as the region's language and turning the archipelago into Christopher Columbus's final stop before he sailed toward the Americas.