It’s fiesta time in Tijarafe, and the devil should join the fun in the early hours of the morning. The Town Hall website says he’ll arrive at 4 am. I’ve only been once in all the years I’ve lived here, and then the devil was two hours late. But then, punctuality is a virtue, so you can’t really expect the devil to have, can you?
The island’s association of amateur astronomers will be holding a star party on Saturday, from 8pm, behind the trees in the plaza beside the tourist office in El Paso. There will be lots of amateur telescopes there, so you can get a good look at, say, Saturn or Jupiter, and they plan to be there until midnight. I gather they speak some English. La Palma has amazing skies. This is…
GranTeCan (Grand Telescopio Canario / Big Canarian Telescope) at sunset. Some six weeks ago I got permission to take sunset photos at the observatory. But one way and another, there was always something that stopped me going: I was ill, or my husband got home late, or the the air was full of Sahara dust and the sunset would be lousy. Yesterday I finally got up to the Roque at…
Customer at Barlovento petrol station. Photo: Theresa My friends from Franceses stopped off at Barlovento petrol station, and saw this man chatting to another customer. Yes, that’s a live parrot on his shoulder. Mind you, there used to be quite a lot of pirates around La Palma.
Sunday was busy. I left home with my son at 10 am to go to Puntagorda, so he could have a go on the Karts. Sadly, it turned out to be a demonstration of Karts, and he couldn’t have a go himself. So I took one very disappointed kid off to lunch at my friend’s house on the edge of the village. It was a nice lunch, with better company….
Yup, it’s silly. The original battle involved something like 80,000 men, which is almost the population of the whole island. So I was expecting a cut-down version. Heck, Shakespeare did battles by having one man come on stage and say, “Imagine the battle…” So Barlovento had a rather good toy castle with about 12 visible defenders, and the sultan gave a speech about the original battle. Then a ship came…