 An old man in a Panama hat was fishing from the promenade, dodging the waves as they broke over the sea wall, spraying the northbound pickup trucks on Avenida Marítima.
As the timber balconies began to throw their shadows out beyond the pastel coloured walls, Cuban salsa spilled out of the bar to throb up through the legs of my table. I took a sip of my sugarcane rum and coke, spooned some spicy mojo sauce onto a Venezuelan arepa (maize cake stuffed with meat), and struggled once again to convince myself that that towering volcano on the watery horizon was not rising from a Caribbean atoll but from Tenerife.
Santa Cruz de La Palma is often known - for reasons that are immediately apparent - as ‘La Havana Chica’ (Little Havana).
La Palma and her little sisters, La Gomera and El Hierro, were once the islands at the edge of the known world. They are still the forgotten gems of the Canary Islands.
La Palma:
When Pizarro, the great conquistador, returned to Spain from Peru he was asked to describe the country’s geography. Ever a man of action, he crumpled up a sheet of paper and dropped it on the table: “It looks like that,” he said.
With this dramatic gesture Pizarro might more accurately have been describing La Palma, the Empire’s greatest Canary Island storehouse on route to the New World. For its size La Palma is the steepest island on Earth, rearing up in a great volcanic  ridge to a mile and a half above sea level, though it’s coastline is only slightly longer than that of the Isle of Man.
Local guide Iván Benítez agreed to show me around an island the landscape of which (I was not disappointed to discover) is more closely related to the Hawaiian Islands than to the Isle of Man. We left the palm-shaded plazas of the capital behind and drove up through terraces of a different kind: seemingly endless plantations of platanos and, higher up, tobacco fields that produce the hand-rolled Santa Cruz cigars which some aficionados say are superior even to those of that other Havana. A mile above town these shelves finally give way to vines that straggle across the volcanic slopes, bearing the grapes for the distinctive Malvasía wine that was once a favourite of Shakespeare.
By the time we entered the ancient forests of Canary pine that had helped to build the Spanish Armada I could appreciate that it takes time to get around an island shaped like a ball of crumpled paper. As Iván put it: “Our roads don’t just have curves . . . they have full circles.”
Our first stop would be Roque de los Muchachos. Quite literally the highpoint of any visit to La Palma, Roque de los Muchachos has been credited by experts as the northern hemisphere’s number one spot for solar observation and this eerie moonscape is now colonised by the silver-domed observatories of a dozen nations.
La Palma’s most spectacular feature, and one of the finest views in the Canaries, was now right at our feet; the pine-clad floor of the immense Caldera de Taburiente crater (8km across) lay a dizzying vertical mile below where we stood. Iván has been leading tours in the crater for years but, like the Guanche warriors who once worshipped here, he is full of respect for the power of this place. Several years ago four people died and many more were forced to spend the night in caves or makeshift shelters when their exit through Barranco de las Angustias (‘Valley of Anguish’) was blocked by 15 metre floodwaters.
Here, way above the clouds at 2426m, Iván gave free rein to his enthusiasm for the natural diversity of his island: “This is the greenest of the Canary Islands and even the other islanders know it as La Isla Bonita – the Beautiful Island.That way, to the north, the land drops quickly through laurel and cedar forest into subtropical cloud-forests where the valleys are so impenetrable that until recently the only access was by sea. To the south there’s a whole chain of volcanoes with many exciting desert trails and quiet beaches.
“Our beaches are black volcanic sand of course,” he added apologetically, “–though that’s probably what has saved us from mass tourism. Most visitors come here to trek or bike rather than lie on the beach ‘though they definitely like to think that they can spend the morning in the hills and still have time to find a deserted cove all for themselves in the afternoon.”
During my time on the island I took advantage of this at every possible opportunity as, from the crater, I moved on to trek among the dense forests and waterfalls of Los Tilos biosphere reserve (the Canary’s largest wooded area) and, later, camped beside the sooty craters of Cumbre Vieja. On La Palma’s southernmost point I enjoyed the strange sensation of walking across several kilometres of land that - thrown up by Volcano Teneguía in 1971 - was younger than I was, and stared across the mirror of the Atlantic, where dolphins and pilot whales jump. On the face of this ‘mirror’ another island has been known to appear: a ghost island that, since time immemorial has appeared in the mist to taunt sailors and fishermen. 16th Century maps exist as ‘proof’ that sailors once succeeded in exploring this Isla Encantada and the fishermen of Fuencaliente still speak of the mythical Saint Brandan’s Island as ‘the eighth Canary Island.’
Ferries regularly link La Palma, La Gomera and El Hierro – presumably sailing right through the ghost island – and after all I had seen on La Palma I was beginning to wonder if three weeks would give me enough time to explore the different characters of these evocative little islands.
La Gomera:
Known simply as ‘La Isla Redonda’ (the round island) La Gomera could more accurately be described as a star. This is most obvious from the air where the deep ravines that fan out from the central peak stand out as dark-green triangles, fading to burnt yellow as they run down to the sea.
Half of the archipelago’s national parks are situated in the Western Canaries and Garajonay National Park, the heart of this ‘emerald star,’ is rated by many as the finest walking country in Spain. The laurel forests here have been described as ‘a living fossil’ of those that once covered much of Mediterranean Europe but visitors who come to experience this unique terrain are often pleased to learn that the rioting vegetation (almost jungle) that clothes the slopes is a product not of the rainfall that they came here to escape, but of mist born of the moisture-laden trade winds.
 Innovative Gomerans have traditionally dealt with the brutal barrancos that are the major feature of their island by pole-vaulting from terrace to terrace and communicating across the void in the world’s only whistling language. Silbo Gomera is more than just a simple system of commands that any well-trained sheepdog would be able to follow: it is a developed and profound language in its own right. Although you still occasionally hear older people whistling to each other across the cactus covered valleys and the occasional youngster joking across the noise of the high street, this unique language is quickly falling into disuse. As Felipe, the old potato farmer who gave me a lift into the park, told me: “The worst thing that ever happened to us was when mobile phones arrived.”
Although, at Felipe’s insistence, we stopped for coffee and an unnecessarily invigorating shot of aguardiente – “for the heart” – it was still early by the time I had hiked up to Garajonay’s highest point. I was struck by a ghostly landscape of moss-strewn bushes and swirling mists and it was a bizarre experience to walk under an ancient tree that the Guanches knew as the sacred Garoé and to find it positively raining under the branches! Some botanist have estimated that the Garoé can condense 8,000 litres of water out of the mountain mists in a single day…and, having stood under there just long enough to get soundly soaked, I could believe it.
The clouds lifted momentarily to frame the peaks of La Palma and then Tenerife’s mighty Teide volcano reared up in silhouette against the rising sun. Plato claimed that these were the last peaks of Atlantis and a further 20 miles to westward lay my final destination: El Hierro, the island that Ptolemy once declared finis terrae - the end of the world.
El Hierro:
In an archipelago where tourists outnumber islanders it comes as a surprise to find yourself on an island where people stop you to ask where you are from, vineyard workers wave and dogs still chase cars.
The fact that tiny El Hierro doesn’t offer a single tourist resort but does boast what the Guinness Book of Records has listed as the world’s smallest hotel (the four-room Punta Grande) is confirmation enough, should any be needed, of the island’s position as a tourist backwater.
The locals, though friendly and talkative, are quietly traditional and do not see any great need to rush into the new Millennium just yet. They are still proud of the statuesque Bimbache warriors who were among the first – and most fearless – victims of the conquistadors and, even today, other Canarios say that ‘if you scratch a Herreño a Bimbache bleeds.’
Much of the island is accessible only by dirt track and, though a 4wd is not strictly necessary, I was already feeling distinctly ‘under-gunned’ as my little Seat hire-car rattled out of the capital, Valverde (no more than a hill-town on any other island).
 I headed south across a petrified landscape of frozen lava rivers towards the fishing village of La Restinga, stopping occasionally to walk among barren rock that looked like it could have been flowing only yesterday. The last big eruption was actually over 200 years ago but you feel - paradoxically on this timeless island - that the earth is still young. There is a feeling like walking on thin ice that comes with a territory whose surface area averages three volcanic cones to every square kilometre.
Toward the far western point of the island the earth becomes increasingly tortured-looking and is riddled with deep pits that make it foolhardy to wander alone. At Orchilla Point – considered the ‘zero meridian’ until 1884 – there’s a cross and a plaque that is engraved with the words: Tristeza y Alegria de los Herreños Emigrantes (symbolising both the sadness of departing emigrants and the happiness of those returning). It brought to mind the small, simple crosses that I’d seen over doors and windows all over the western Canaries, and Iván’s explanation: “They’re a sign of mourning for people who were unlucky enough to die away from these islands.”
Even so, I found the desolate Punta Orchilla less than inviting. Then, an hour later, as I crested the hill at Las Sabinas, I passed an even more disturbing landscape – an entire forest of crippled juniper trees, twisted into tortured shapes and often almost bent double by the Atlantic winds. The ride down into the El Golfo (The Gulf) was a snaky, scary one with the Seat’s tyres spitting pebbles over sheer hundred-foot drops. Still it was an impressive introduction to the site of the world’s largest ever landslide where 50,000 years ago an estimated 300square kilometres of rock slipped beneath the waves and sent a 100-metre tidal wave as far as the American coast.
On my last night at the ‘end of the world’ I camped on a gently sloping black beach that gave me a grandstand view of a laser-show that far surpasses even the best of Tenerife’s nightclubs. Spain’s Law of the Sky protects this entire area as an ‘astronomical reserve’ and I promised myself at least one shooting star before I slept.
While I waited I began counting stars. The sand moulded itself comfortably to my body and the Atlantic shore-break made the pebbles rumble.
I counted as far as 37 but there were many more. |
"He who dies with the most experiences wins"
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