La Palma has a small rum factory (the Aldea distillery), at Puerto Espíndola, in the borough of San Andres y Sauces. Unlike most rum factories, they start with sugar cane rather than molasses. After all, La Palma had commercial sugar cane plantations in the 15th century, before the West Indies had them. At harvesting season, the factory’s south building smells of sugar cane being crushed and fermented. Distillation happens in…
Wow what a week! I worked as a tour guide on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. I spent most of Wednesday morning on paperwork for a friend’s car (the car was taken off the road in 2006, and they’re still demanding road tax. But I finally have proof that the car’s long gone.) On Thursday evening, Friday evening to 2 am and all day Saturday (8:30 am- 7 pm) I was…
La Palma now has 25 businesses that specialise in astrotourism to some degree. (It’s not surprising: all you have to do is look up on a cloudless night to see why) These businesses got together between November 24th and 30th to swap ideas on how to help each other give tourists a good time. There were talks and excursions to restaurants that offer stargazing with…
La Palma’s pine forests are lovely, and at this time of the year, the upper reaches are often above the clouds, even when it’s raining below. If you follow the LP3 footpath up from the turn off for Pico de la Nieve, you quickly reach this stone spiral in the woods. The whole thing is about 10 m across, and I loved it. I think it’s pretty recent, similar to…
La Palma has a network of well-marked footpaths, most of which are centuries old. As late as the 1960s, walking was still a major form of transport for the islanders, The whole network of hiking trails on the island comes to over 1,000 km, and between them they pass through just about every kind of scenery on the island: lava fields, pine forests, lush laurel forests, farmland and village centres….
I spent most of yesterday feeling really down, and feeling that I wasn’t getting anywhere. I wasn’t sure whether I felt down because I STILL hadn’t finished a short section of the book about the Roque after three days, or whether I wasn’t finishing the section because I felt down. Well I’d tried bashing on for three days, so today I tried something different. I asked permission to get inside…