I went for a walk at Llano de los Jables, near to where I found the tiny, red plants just before Easter. The landscape was stunning, especially the cloud waterfall. But the most memorable thing I discovered was quite a large area where stars glimmered on the ground, like very, very thinly-spread glitter. And like glitter, the stars tended to wink on and off. Of course I investigated. I know…
The most recent eruption in the Canary Islands was Teneguía, in 1971 (see Thursday, 21 February 2008 Which Planet Are You On?). It’s a nice place to visit, but you have to be fairly fit. St. Antony’s Volcano (Volcan San Antonio) is nice in a completely different way. For one thing, it looks like a volcano should look, and you can walk halfway around the spectacular circular crater. You…
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…
The whole island of La Palma is volcanic, but it’s extremely young. The oldest rocks are only about three million years old, so there’s no dinosaur fossils here. Much of the island is basalt – a dark grey rock which tends to form hexagonal columns, like the Giant’s Causeway or Los Organos on La Gomera. Over thousands of years it weathers to a lighter grey or brownish-grey. The red rocks…
I come from Yorkshire and I’m used to limestone caves, so I was surprised when I found that the volcanic island of La Palma has lots of caves too. Volcanic caves are formed when a river of lava solidifies on the top and sides, but the middle (insulated by the solid-but-still-hot lava around it) stays runny. Sometimes big bubbles of gas force their way to the surface, leaving a hole…