La Palma - the Magical Mountainous Isle of the West Canaries

The massive backbone of La Palma curves itself into a shape that makes it the world’s biggest question mark, which is apt because the Canarian island presents quite a mystery. It is simply this: how can it be that one of the most beautiful islands in the whole of what could loosely be described as Europe remains so unknown, unvisited and unspoilt?

You only have to look a few miles across the ocean from its precipitous eastern flanks to see what happens when lovely islands become known, visited and spoilt. Tenerife has many wonderful attributes, but its big bow to mass tourism isn’t one of them.

One of the many volcanic calderas on La Palma

“Go to La Palma, ­it is like Tenerife was 50 years ago,” said my contact when I told her I wanted to go somewhere very scenic and reasonably quiet, with a little bit of sophistication and good living thrown in for good measure.

La Palma hit the jackpot. In fact, I have no trouble in putting it way up there in my top worldwide holiday recommendations .

The list of what the place lacks is so short it would be far easier to deal with it first. If you like long nights out in noisy resorts heaving with well lubricated humanity, forget La Palma. It really is quiet.

If you like lolling about on endless white beaches, forget that too. La Palma is very short on sandy strands and the few it has are black as coal.

Now for the positives. If you like beautiful places rich in dramatic and interesting landscapes, then you really would have to go a long way to beat La Palma. There are corners of its vast mountainous interior where you could easily pretend you were in some place like the wilds of Wyoming.

Most people who visit this island go for the scenery. It’s the only sunshine destination I’ve ever been to where nine out of ten fellow tourists climb off the plane armed with hiking boot and poles. Walking is by far La Palma’s biggest attraction. Daily walking tours are offered at every hotel and the routes followed by the professional guides are as interesting as they are scenic and stunning.

The organised tour I joined explored the far north of the island where we passed intriguing hippy villages, mythical and amazing dragon trees, prehistoric cave drawings, precipitous gorges, old ladies selling hand-glazed almonds, young men selling hand-made ice cream, feral but friendly dogs and a truly amazing local farmers’ market which put many of ours to shame.

I used the word precipitous, but I will refrain from doing so for the rest of this article. Everything about La Palma is precipitous. It is a world on a slope - and a steep one at that. The island doesn’t boast a volcano ­- it is a volcano. Or a whole variety of volcanoes to be exact.

It is, by the way, the place that might one day - according to some geologists -­ be responsible for wiping out the eastern coastline of America with a vast tsunami. They reckon that half the island will slide into the Atlantic and cause the biggest wave in history.

Our walks guide laughed when I mentioned this and told me she knew the scientists involved and what they’d actually said was that it wouldn’t happen in the next 2,500 years. Which, I have to say, allowed me to sleep more soundly for the rest of my stay.

The northern part of the island is dominated by the mighty Caldera de Taburiente, the largest erosion crater in the world measuring six miles across and more than 5,000 feet deep. The mountains that surround the crater climb to almost 8,000 feet and you can drive around much of this rocky altitudinous ring if you have the courage and inclination.

I say courage because the road to the top could win the accolade of being one of the most zig-zagged in Europe. My arms ached with steering around so many bends by the time I’d been to the top and back. The reason the road exists, by the way, is because the summit is home to the world famous Roque de los Muchachos Observatory where so many galactic observations of great note have been taken in the past few decades.

The one place you can’t reach by car is the enormous, forested, gorge-riddled, crater far below. Only the deep Barranco de las Angustias canyon leads into the inner area of the caldera and the only way for you to get in is to hike along one of the numerous marked trails. The entire shooting match is a national park, by the way, and jealously guarded so that there are very few signs of civilisation.

My daughter was rendered speechless as we walked along one of the higher trails to reach a vertigo-inducing viewpoint. It was like being in the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone National Park - vast and silent, save for the distant crash of water falling somewhere down in one of the many gorges and coombes.

And like everywhere else in La Palma above a certain altitude, the place is scented with the heady, fresh, aroma of pine – it is, indeed, the most forested island in the archipelago. The Canarian pines are truly remarkable trees ­- they grow anywhere -­ on inaccessible crags and on bare volcanic rock. Our guide explained how the trees “milk” the clouds that gather around the higher slopes with their exceptionally long needles, and can take in more moisture from these six-inch long appendages than from their roots.

 The billions of needles in the “cloud forests” (as the stands of pines are known) are so efficient at “milking” the moisture they can take too much which leads to a rather magical result. On hot days (and there are a lot of hot days on La Palma) you can be toiling across bare and broiling mountainsides only to enter one of these forests and find it raining a cool and refreshing vapour that falls not from the sky but from the trees. 

Hot days… The mere thought is magical enough on a miserable January day here in the UK,­ and it is a thought that makes La Palma seem even more desirable. The temperature down in the Canaries at this time of the year is perfect for human consumption, and it’s the closest winter sun destination to the wet and windy UK.

West Coast fishing village

I stayed at the Hotel Taburiente Playa in Los Cancajos, ­and the Hacienda San Jorge Apartments located in the same resort.

To call Los Cancajos a resort is a bit of an over-statement ­it’s merely a collection of a dozen or so hotels dotted around a few shops and restaurants,­ but it does boast a sandy beach (albeit of black volcanic sand) and it is just a ten minute bus ride from the charming, friendly and picturesque island capital of Santa Cruz.

More about that mini-city in a moment, first a brief description of the Hacienda San Jorge. The comfortable apartments are situated in colonial style two storey buildings around a tropical garden, which itself is centred around a vast swimming pool. So proud is the hotel of these gardens it arranges daily botanical tours so you can admire the attractive little jungle at close hand.

As is usual in the Canaries, the hotel restaurant operates on the buffet-style model and is no worse for it, there being always one fresh-cooked station where a chef prepares cuts of fish and meat to order.

The breakfast service was particularly impressive in that it boasted the notable addition of help-yourself orange-presses so you could crush your own juice, then add it to the champagne style bubbly that was freely available on ice.

Just the early morning holiday lift I needed in readiness for a shopping trip into town ­- shopping being something of a nadir experience for me. Not in Santa Cruz, it wasn’t. The place is stuffed with sophisticated designer label shops, but it also is adorned with a unique form of architecture which is quaint and pleasing to the eye.

Intricate wooden balconies hang over just about every street down in the old part of town and many of these are festooned with a wealth of hanging baskets that would make the average English parks department green with envy.

It is in Santa Cruz that you begin to glean something of the island’s rich, sometimes violent and always swashbuckling history. Before the Spaniards turned up it was divided into a dozen or so kingdoms inhabited by a kind of Neolithic indigenous people called the Benahoare. They, alas, are now long gone, but remains of their remote island existence still remain dotted around the mountain slopes.

It was inevitable that the Canaries would become a target for incursion - once the New World was discovered across the ocean the archipelago became an important steeping stone to the distant west. But the merchants who thrived here didn’t just trade in shipping, they realised that the combination of a warm climate and fertile soils was perfect for grape growing.

Madeira, not far north, is still famous for the strong wine of that name ­but long ago northern Europe’s favourite tipple was “malmsey”, ­and it came from La Palma. The island wines are still well worth quaffing today and I enjoyed several that would shame stuff sold in this country at four times the price.

But it is bananas that La Palma goes bananas about nowadays, which takes us to the remote south west coast of the island. Under the black and vertiginous slopes of some fairly new volcanoes, these yellow plantains rule the coastal roost in vast man-made plateaus built into the moonscapes of lava. It is a weird place to be sure, but the bananas are excellent in that they are sweeter and creamier than the ones sold in this country.

It was to the very heart of these coastal plantations that we went to find our other hotel – the huge La Palma Princess - and establishment which is more like an entire resort than a single hotel, but is nowhere near as daunting as it sounds.

Lighthouse at remote Faro de Fuencaliente in the far south

It is the island’s only bow to large-scale tourism - and one hopes the government keep things that way – but I have to admit we hugely enjoyed luxuriating in its many acres. There’s not much else to do on this side of the island but luxuriate. At the Princess that’s easy to do because the place boasts no fewer than 11 swimming pools, a spa, a gym, endless tennis courts and other amenities too numerous to mention.

It’s all attractively laid out so that despite its massive size nothing is too “in your face” as it is in many larger resorts. The food is as good as you’ll be served on any package, anywhere – and the general level of service is first class.

If you wanted nothing more than a lazy week in warm winter sun far from freezing Britain, then you could do no worse than chill-out beside one of the Princess’s many landscaped pools.

But La Palma is not really about that. It is an island that offers the ultimate in scenic adventure – much though I loved lazing by the pool, I adored the hard work of exploring its wondrous peaks much, much more.

La Palma style canine