Tower of Jewels is one of the common names for Echium wildpretii. Some of the other are red bugloss, Tenerife bugloss or Mount Teide bugloss. The Spanish name is tajinaste grande or tajinaste rojo, although the ones on La Palma can be blue or mauve. The individual flowers are tiny, but the spikes can be anything up to 3 m high. And they’re in flower on the peaks of La…
Today is mother’s day in Spain. Or rather, everywhere in Spain but here. And to the best of my knowledge, the first place in Spain to have an official Mother’s Day was Breña Baja. The local poet, Félix Duarte Pérez , left home for Venezuela at some horrendously young age (fifteen, I think). Not surprisingly, he missed his mother a good deal, and they sent each other lots of letters….
When I first came to La Palma, the tourist office was in temporary accommodation in the third floor of an office building, with absolutely nothing at street-level to indicate where it was. Basically, you had to ask a local to find it. Obviously this left something to be desired, so they put up two signs: one at the south end of town pointing north, and one at the north end,…
Artefuego glassblowing studio is at the back of Plaza Sotomayor, where they hold the Argual flea market every Sunday. It’s a good idea to combine the two, because they hold public demonstrations on Sundays between 10 am and 2 pm. They combine fragments of lava into their creations, and to the best of their knowledge, they’re the only people in the world to do so. This makes every piece unique….
La Palma has lots and lots of wildflowers at this time of year. We even have five different poppies on La Palma. The Corn Poppy, Field Poppy, Flanders Poppy, or Red Poppy is easily the commonest. This is the poppy that mostly grows wild in fields. The next commonest comes from California, which has a similar climate. And then there’s the opium poppies, which are presumably garden escapes. And finally…
I got a couple of day’s work looking after some Canadian visitors to the island. (Actually they’re Americans who’ve lived in Canada for a long time.) Nice people. They run a hotel called Trout Point Lodge in Nova Scotia, and they’re hoping to start astrotourism over there. They were staying in a hotel I wasn’t previously aware of, the Hacienda de Abajo in Tazacorte. It’s gorgeous – it’s a converted…