Luscious La Palma
This verdant and vertical island is dominated by the Caldera de Taburiente – a huge volcanic crater. In fact, the entire island is littered with volcanoes and this is one of the major draws for the tourists who have made it out here – the extreme landscape lends itself to stunning scenery, perfect for mountain biking and walks.
That explains why on day 2, instead of lounging by my pool I found myself lacing up my walking shoes. The previous day had been the usual ‘orientation day’ – we were staying in Los Llanos de Aridane, the most populated town on the island and had visited the Sunday flea market, held in a square of old buildings just outside the town centre. To find this, we first had to find the tourist office, as the flea market wasn’t where we thought it should have been and, to find the tourist office, we ended up in the middle of the weekly farmers’ market, so it had been a thorough introduction to the sights of Los Llanos. The tourist office had an excellent map and guide to the many ‘senderos’ (footpaths) of the island. On such a mountainous landscape it’s clear these footpaths have been vital links for the communities living here – there are 1,200kms of road on the island and almost 1,000km of footpaths.
And that brings us back to Day 2. We picked an ‘easy’ route out of the guide, one that should take about 3 hours and off we set. What I had failed to notice and what the guidebook had pretty much skirted around was that the first half hour was entirely, breath-takingly, relentlessly uphill. I had plenty of time to consider other appropriate adjectives for both the hill and my husband on suggesting this walk in the first place as I took a number of strategic ‘photo opportunity breaks’ on the climb. When we finally got to the top, it went down, then up. In fact, after a week on the island I calculate there’s roughly 6 miles of straight road and absolutely nowhere is flat.
This was confirmed the next day when we took the hire car up to the highest point on the island at 2,400 metres; Roque de los Muchachos. This involved an awful lot of hairpins, the usual fraught encounters with local drivers overtaking you on said corners, compounded by meeting the occasional bus. However, it is worth it. There’s a weather-related phenomenon that keeps the clouds below the summit (and incidentally they usually stay on the eastern side of the island, so keep to the west for the best weather), so you should have plenty to see at the top and this has also led to one of the world’s biggest observatories setting up shop here.
This is another major attraction of the island – it has very little light pollution and is an official ‘Dark Sky’ location, making it perfect for anyone with an interest in astronomy. You can visit the observatory during the day to get an idea of the sheer scale of the projects going on here. If you fancy a go yourself, you can do a star-gazing tour with experts with slightly smaller telescopes to make sense of the night sky for you.
A day’s tour of the island showed the huge amount of banana plantations that cover pretty much every available (not quite flat) surface and it looked as though the locals all had their own avocado trees as well. The beaches are the expected black sand and there are some lovely natural swimming pools dotted about the coast, so a hire car is a must for exploring.
After another day of walking I put my (blistered) foot down on our last day there and acted as support vehicle when my husband chose to walk the island’s most famous footpath – the Volcano Route. This is an eight hour trek through lava flow, calderas and cones, ending at the sea. There was something about the first two hours heading steadily uphill that was enough for me to choose the sun lounger this time.