The Parador on La Palma is just outside the village of San Jose, in Breña Baja. (Paradors are a national chain of posh hotels, and very nice they are too.) Tonight (April 22nd ) at 8 pm they’ll be hosting the first public dinner with a new menu, inspired by astronomical bodies. A professional Starlight guide will be there to talk about the planets, and afterwards, there will be stargazing….
Although Father Christmas does visit Spanish children, he’s a new arrival. Traditionally the presents arrive on the morning of January 6th, when the three kings visit baby Jesus. This is why the sales haven’t really started yet – Christmas isn’t over here. And on the evening of the 5th, they ride in procession through most of the major towns and villages in Spain. In previous years we’ve usually gone to…
Tourists sometimes go nuts trying to find the village of Breña Baja, or Fuencaliente. There’s a really simple reason why they can’t find them. They don’t exist. Breña Baja and Fuencaliente are municipalities, and their town halls are in the villages of San Jose and Los Canarios, respectively. It like driving all over the south east of England, looking for the town of Sussex. The map shows the 14 municipalities…
La Palma has a new weekly market, this time at the popular tourist resort of Los Cancajos. It’s open on Saturdays from 9 am to 2 pm, at the south end of the sea front, near the Las Olas hotel. There’s another fairly new market that takes place on Fridays from 4-9 pm at Finca La Principal, just off the old airport in Breña Alta. And of course, Santa Cruz…
I don’t smoke, so everything I know about Palmeran cigars is from hearsay. But they seem to have a very good reputation. Certainly Winston Churchill was known to be a fan, and certainly they get shipped off to the Spanish royal family. Most of the tobacco farms on the island are in Santa Cruz, Breña Baja, and especially Breña Alta. Typically, the crop is grown in tiny fields and given…
Rather confusingly, the main fiesta in San José (the capital of Breña Baja) isn’t St Joseph’s Day, it’s the feast of Santiago and Santana (St James and St Anne) on the 25th and 26th of July, respectively. Since we’ve just had the bajada, the fiesta is a much quieter affair than usual. They just did the religious part: a special mass, a procession, and a loa. So what’s a loa,…