The history of Adeje runs back to the time of the Guanches, when this southwestern district of Tenerife was the head of one of the nine menceyatos into which the island was divided. The tradition recorded by the chroniclers places here the court of Tinerfe the Great, the powerful mencey who, a generation before the conquest, came to rule the whole island from Adeje. On his death, his sons split the territory into menceyatos, and Adeje fell, according to the chronicles, to the lineage of Atbitocazpe; on the eve of the conquest the mencey Pelinor reigned. The very place name comes from the aboriginal language and has been interpreted as "mountain" or "rugged massif," a reference to the imposing relief that dominates the municipality.

During the Castilian conquest of Tenerife (1494-1496), led by the adelantado Alonso Fernández de Lugo, Adeje belonged to the so-called peace faction: it offered no armed resistance and even cooperated with the conquerors. The island's incorporation into the Crown of Castile was completed in 1496. Yet the memory of Guanche resistance survives in the legendary figure of Ichasagua, a mencey who, according to tradition, held out in the heights of the Adeje massif after the general surrender; his memory remains tied to the Roque del Conde, also known as the fortress of Ahíyo. A distinction must be drawn here between the documented and the legendary: much of the story of Tinerfe and Ichasagua comes from later chroniclers and is treated cautiously by modern historians.

After the conquest, the lands of Adeje passed to the powerful Ponte family, of Genoese origin, who established the Lordship (Señorío) of Adeje, one of the few seigneurial regimes in the Canary Islands. Its heart was the Casa Fuerte, a fortified residence whose construction was authorized by Princess Juana in 1555 and built around 1556 on the initiative of Pedro de Ponte. For more than three centuries the Casa Fuerte was the political, economic and social centre of the Adeje jurisdiction, a symbol of Ponte power.

The engine of that wealth was sugar. Adeje was home to one of the last sugar mills in Tenerife, driven by the waters of the Barranco del Infierno, with output that ranked among the island's largest and was exported to mainland Spanish and northern European ports. To sustain the business, the Ponte family brought in enslaved African labour —they even traded with the English corsair John Hawkins— so that the lordship's economy rested for generations on cane, the mill and slavery. The English traveller George Glas, in the 18th century, left a record of the many slaves in the marquis's service. This African heritage left a deep imprint on the area's population.

The prestige of the seigneurial house kept rising: in 1666 King Charles II granted the Pontes the title of Marquis of Adeje. The Casa Fuerte came to hold a valuable documentary archive that the historian José de Viera y Clavijo described as "the Treasure of the Canaries." But the decline of sugar, replaced by the vine and later by other crops, gradually eroded the splendour of the lordship. The complex suffered a severe fire in 1902 that left it in ruins; today the gateway, the tower and various walls survive as witnesses of that era.

For centuries Adeje lived off an agricultural and fishing economy. In the midlands, cane, vines and cereals were grown and, in modern times, bananas and tomatoes for export; on the coast, small settlements such as La Caleta were born from the work of fishermen who lived in caves and humble huts. It was a rural, quiet and sparsely populated municipality, still unaware of its future destiny.

The great transformation came in the second half of the 20th century. From 1965 onwards, the businessman Rafael Puig Lluvina acquired land on the coast of Adeje and Arona —then a wasteland with no water, electricity or roads— and drove the tourist development that would give rise to Playa de las Américas. Along that shoreline emerged Costa Adeje, today one of the leading destinations of southern Tenerife, with its enclaves of El Duque, Fañabé and La Caleta. Luxury hotels, seafront promenades and serviced beaches turned this former sugar lordship into an international tourist powerhouse, with nearly 300 days of sunshine a year, without entirely losing the traces of its rich Guanche, seigneurial and seafaring past.