The Cultural Landscape of Risco Caído and the Sacred Mountains of Gran Canaria is, like all cultural landscapes, the product of a specific geographical environment and its relationship with the inhabitants.

The mountainous centre of Gran Canaria, extraordinary in its geomorphology and biogeography, is also extraordinary in the fact that two cultures, which were radically different, have occupied it continuously for over 1,500 years. The island, first inhabited by pre-Hispanic people from the Amazigh (Berber) cultural context of North Africa, who probably reached Gran Canaria around the beginning of the era, was then conquered by the Castilians in the late fifteenth century, a European civilisation at the dawn of the Modern Age. The present Canarian society is heir to both.

These two civilisations evolved on the island, each one endowing it with new elements that would enrich it. Many aspects of the pre-Hispanic way of life were inherited by the Europeans, while others were abandoned. The most important aspect to be abandoned was the sacred nature that the pre-European population bestowed upon the mountains of the centre of Gran Canaria.​