Purpurariae Ins
Purpurariae Ins islands off the coast of Mauretania, which are said to have been discovered by Juba (Plin. Nat. 6.37), who established there a manufactory of purple. If his description of them as being 625 M. P. from the Fortunate Islands be received, they cannot be, as D'Anville supposed, Lanzerote or Fuente Ventura, the two nearest of the Canaries to the African continent. Still greater difficulties exist in supposing them to be Madeira and Porto Santo, which are too remote from Juba's kingdom to be the seat of a manufacture of purple carried on by him. Lelewel (Endeckungen der Carthager und Griechen, p. 140) considers them to be the islands of Lanzarote Sta Clara, with the smaller ones of Graciosa and Alegranza. (Kenrick, Phoenicia, p. 229; Humboldt, Cosmos, vol. ii. p. 129, trans.)
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.