A long time ago, a young goatherd in Puntallana fell in love. Nothing unusual about that of course, especially since the girl was very beautiful. The trouble was that she didn’t feel the same way. He was tall, handsome and athletic, but she hoped to marry someone richer. After all, a goatherd’s wife worked fourteen hours a day and went hungry in the bad years. But he wouldn’t take “No,”…
Sow thistles look rather like a dandelion gone balistic. That is, the individual flowers look much like dandelions, but they’re growing on a shrub anything up to 2 m (6 ft) tall. And now they’re flowing all over the island, especially on the east, up to about 1,000 ft. Like so many other plants here, La Palma has a different species from everywhere else – Sonchus palmensis. The local names…
The 19th century butcher’s shop, Breña Baja, La Palma The old butcher’s shop stands on the outskirts of the village of San Jose, in Breña Baja, near the Paradorof La Palma. The building dates from the late 19th century, and it was a butcher’s shop until the 1960s. But now it’s been renovated as a craft exhibition and shop. The famous cigars of The Breñas Although the place is small,…
If you were shopping in Santa Cruz last week, you might have seen a road train full of infants, grinning and waving, and shouting out “¡Feliz Navidad!” The road train belongs to the local bus company. It’s available for hire all year, but it seems to be pretty solidly booked in the last week of school term. The school where I used to work had a regular routine. We put…
These tomatoes grow wild on La Palma, and they’re about the size of marbles. The locals call them tomates bicacaros and don’t think much of them, perhaps because people used to eat them when they couldn’t afford anything else. I believe that the only reason they don’t sell for some daft price is that they’ve got very thin skins, so they don’t keep. I have some in my garden, and…
The William Herschel Telescope at sunset. . The William Herschel Telescope was for many years the biggest and best optical telescope in Europe (until GranTeCan opened in 2009). The main mirror is 4.2 m across (165″, or 13′ 9″) which astronomers call “a good light bucket”. It’s rather old as world-class telescopes go, since it opened in 1987, but it still produced excellent science. In fact data from the WHT…