I asked my Facebook friends for their favourite places to watch the sunrise or sunset on La Palma. Sunrise: Pico de la Montaña Montaña de Las Breñas Tirimaga (but there’s always a cold wind – wrap up well) Birigoyo Roque de Los Muchachos NB: The road to the Roque is closed from sunset to sunrise to avoid light pollution. You’ll have to walk. And please don’t have any car lights…
The Canarian Tourist Board have some good ideas. One was to invite 7 artists from all around Europe to visit an island each with a local artist, and La Palma got Steve Simpson. who was hosted by Victor Jaubert. You can see the work of the artists at the Twitter hashtag #onthedraw
Well that was fun. Even though I was in (I think) the fourth group, the tour into the hot spring (Fuente Santa) started bang on time. First there was an audio visual presentation, then we put on the hard hats and went down the tunnel. The guide pointed out the various places along the route where we were going through either solid basalt lava, or porous volcanic rubble. Along the…
Fuencaliente means “Hot Spring”. The southernmost municipality takes its name from the hot spring which seeped out into pools on Echentive beach. It was famous for curing all kinds of sickness, including leprosy and syphilis, so Fuencaliente used to attract sick people from all over Europe and even South America. That’s the setting for “A Star in the Water”, one of the stories in “The Seer’s Stone“. And then Volcan…
You see a lot of flags on La Palma. Most English visitors will recognise the flags of Spain and the European Union. But the Canary Islands are an autonomous region within Spain, and they have their own flag too. You see it a lot, especially around May 30th, which is Canary Day. And then each island has its own flag. Here’s the flag of La Palma: And as if…
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…