The Christmas decorations are up in Santa Cruz, and most of the villages too. I particularly liked this Christmas “tree” outside a shop on the main street in Santa Cruz. It’s made from the dead flower stalk of an agarve plant.
When I arrived on La Palma in 1990, Christmas trees were very much an innovation, and expensive. Most people had nativity scenes instead, and they still do. But Christmas trees are gorgeous, so they’ve really caught on. But people got into the habit of being innovative while the trees were expensive, and it’s stuck.
Agaves originally come from Mexico, and they’re close relatives of the plant used to make tequila. The rosette of leaves grows from anything between five and twenty years before the enormous flower spike appears, anything up to 4 m high. When the spectacular flower dies, so does the plant.
Their other claim to fame is that the the centre of these flower stalks is much lighter than water, so they make a cheap and cheerful swimming aid. These days, kids use inflatable armbands and rings, the same as everywhere else, but many of the adults on the island learned to swim using agaves.
