Saturday is the famous Transvulcania. Crazy people will be running an ultramarathon around La Palma. The main race starts at 6 am down at the lighthouse at the southern tip of the island. The runners will race up the central spine of the island to the picnic site at El Pilar, then Punta de Los Roques. The race continues anticlockwise around the Caldera rim, climbing up to the observatory at…
Cochineal and Prickerly Pears
In the 1850s the export market for Palmeran wine collapsed, and somebody had the bright idea of going into cochineal production. Before the advent of synthetic dyes, this was far and away the best red dye available, particularly for wool. For one thing, it doesn’t fade. Cochineal is made from a parasitic insect (Dactylopius coccus), which lives on prickly pears (tuneras), so the plants and insects were imported from Mexico….
Fiesta de la Cruz
Fiesta de La Cruz is a major festival in Santa Cruz de La Palma, Breña Alta, and Breña Baja. On the night of May 2nd, practically all the roadside crosses in Santa Cruz, Breña Baja and Breña Alta will be decorated, most of them gorgeously. The people who worked on them sit close all night, usually making a party of it and setting off lots of fire-crackers. This is partly…
Carolyn Porco
Carolyn Porco is head of NASA’s Cassini mission to Saturn. As a teenager in the Bronx she saw Saturn through a friend’s telescope, and was immediately addicted to astronomy. So that’s what she did at university. After graduating, she knew she wanted to study planets. NASA was sending unmanned ships to Mars and Venus, and she wanted to be part of it, and did her Ph.D. on the dynamics of…
Prehistoric Rock Carvings
The people who lived here before the Spanish invasion in 1493 were called Benauaritas. Since they didn’t have writing, not all that much is known about them, and what there is comes from the invaders. Not exactly an unbiased source! Their technology was pretty basic, maybe because the climate in La Palma is kind enough not to encourage things like weaving. They wore skins, lived mostly in caves, herded goats…
Easter under Franco
My husband was telling me what Easter was like under Franco’s dictatorship. Catholicism was pretty much compulsory. From Good Friday to Easter Sunday, the one TV channel showed the test card and played solemn classical music. The one radio channel also played solemn classical music. It wasn’t acceptable to play pop music, either live or on cassette. You couldn’t even sing or whistle. Acting happy was a sin. He was…