On La Gomera

We are just back from La Gomera, one of the smaller Canary Islands. We’d had a very stressful January waiting for test results (thankfully my cancer surveillance scan was clear, making it two years and four months that I’ve been clear of cancer) and it was my birthday.  So we headed off for a well earned week of sunshine.

La Gomera doesn’t have an international airport. You have to fly to Tenerife Sud and take a ferry from Los Cristianos. This adds a few hours to the journey but is well worth it, as the island is more natural and less developed. We stayed at a lovely hotel on the south side called Jardin Tecina. It has white-walled and terracotta-roofed apartments spread out in a botanic garden across a cliff top. From our balcony we gazed over flowering shrubs towards palm trees and the shimmering sea.

It was 20 degrees every day. The midday sun felt very hot on skin that had not been exposed to the outside air for many months, so we sought the shade at this time. I would read and T would paint. Each day we went to the saltwater pool mid-afternoon for a swim, followed by coffee and cake on the sun-loungers.

The island is renowned for its walks. It is an extinct volcano with deep ravines and steep ridges that rises to about 5000 feet. The mountaintops are covered in a dense forest of laurel and myrtle that has its own ecosystem. When the wind blows from the north and east, clouds form and give misty rain on the summits and it gets pretty cold. This happened on my first day out, I’d hired a car to explore and do some walks, and when I got back from the cool and damp north side of the island T told me the sun had shone for her all day.

Thankfully the wind changed and the hillwalks I did on two other days were warm and sunny. One walk was up a steep sided ravine to a high village, then back down a stony ridge. I met a few walkers and a flock of goats. The other was through the forest with an ascent of La Fortaleza, the holy mountain of the Gomerans (who were ethnically Berber). It was a steep climb through crags to a flat topped summit, where altars and ritual sites have been found. This was the last refuge of the ethnic Gomerans after the Spanish invasion some 500 years ago. The conquistadores showed them no mercy.   

The hotel was a pan-European convocation. The majority of guests were German, then Scandinavian, Dutch and French. The Brits were in a minority. The food was fantastic. Breakfast and dinner were a tasting menu of different dishes, several cooked immediately for you by chefs at serving stations. We indulged ourselves so much that we rarely needed to eat lunch. The Gomeran specialities are palm syrup – dark, sweet and smoky, it is extracted from the sap of palm trees – and small black-skinned potatoes that are grown in terraces on the steep hillsides. By the end of our stay we were more tanned, somewhat heavier and wishing we had booked a second week.

We came home to stormy cold weather and the news that a good friend and neighbour had just passed. Her breast cancer had recurred aggressively and despite courses of chemotherapy and radiotherapy she had succumbed. We put our unpacking on hold and went to the wake. The next day we paid our last respects in a windy and cold graveyard along with several hundred others. Despite the spitting rain, we were glad to be there.