In the Spanish spoken in the Canary Islands there are several lexical units that come from the prehispanic linguistic system. Five of these words, all of them related to the raising of sheep and goats, are analyzed in this paper. The subsistence and the economic organization of the Canarian natives was based mainly on the raising and use of these animals, and after the conquest, many aborigines were employed as shepherds. That is why some of their old and simple words have come to be a part of the vocabulary used nowadays.
