In the north, the Irish and then the Norse settled the Faeroes before the Norse jumped off to Iceland, Greenland, and (briefly) the coast of North America.

In the south, the Canary Islands were inhabited by the Guanches, who were present on the islands around 1000 BC and were originally from North Africa. (Although about half of the current Canarian population's DNA is Guanche, the culture and language have been largely extinct for centuries.)

The Guanches were reliant on stone tools when encountered by the Portuguese in the 15th century. They lacked metals and had no remaining tradition of navigation; the Canaries have strong currents and trade winds, so smaller vessels would have been death traps. As a result, the Guanches never expanded west or north into the rest of the islands in that region (Cape Verde, the Azores, Madeira, collectively known as "Macaronesia"); they were uninhabited when the Portuguese explored them, although there was some evidence of Roman and Viking exploration on Madeira.