The lunar
landscapes of El Hierro, the smallest of the seven Canary Islands, are dotted
with hundreds of extinct volcanoes and fireproof trees. Horizontal rain feeds
the high-altitude pine forests, and a fish that comes shooting out of the sea
ready-cooked — if a certain waiter is to be believed — feeds the locals and
visitors alike. While the waiter may have been exaggerating, there’s no
overstating the natural beauty of the Canaries’ ‘Magnificent Seventh’.
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| HOLEY ISLE: Satellite image shows the massive gap left when a chunk of El Hierro went AWOL |
El Hierro is half the place it used to be,
but that’s no criticism. Most of the other half was dislodged
by an earthquake 50,000 years ago and slid beneath the waves with one El of a splash.
The resulting tsunami, which scientists estimate was 100 metres high, swept
across the Atlantic and swamped the eastern seaboards of North and South
America. If you saw the 1998 disaster movie, Deep Impact, starring Robert Duvall,
Morgan Freeman, Tea Leoni and Elijah Wood, it was that size of a tsunami.
When I was in hot and sunny
El Hierro recently, 80 tremors were recorded in one night — this is a lot more than the normal daily dose
— though I suspect my snoring contributed
to the unusually high count on the seismographs. Exhausted after a long day of
trekking through forests and up and down extinct volcanoes, I neither heard nor
felt a thing. I’d been so near to extinction myself that I collapsed face-down
on my bed, still covered from head to toe in volcanic dust. I wasn’t there when
the maid came by the next day, so I didn’t hear her screams when she clapped
eyes on what she must have thought was the new Turin Shroud.
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| FINTASTIC: A tasty peto caught off El Hierro |
If you’re fit, scaling El
Hierro’s volcanoes is easy-peasy. If you’re not, all that physical stuff
is far from being a lava minute, but it doesn’t half work up an appetite. Being
an island, seafood rules, and it really is of the freshest and finest quality,
and cheap too. As well as the old favourites of merluza (hake) and grilled
sardines, squid and octopus, there’s peto, which you won’t find in the
Mediterranean. It’s a long, sleek fish —
like a pointy-nosed torpedo with fins —
and a tough-looking customer you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alleyway, but
its flesh is so tender it melts in the mouth. No self-respecting restaurateur
would dream of buying frozen peto, so if you see it chalked up on a blackboard,
it’s a dead cert — a not-long-dead cert — that it
was caught just a few hours before.
That was the case in La
Vieja Pangorda (the Fat Old Lady) restaurant in the small port of La Restinga, where
I was introduced to this fearsome fish. La Vieja Pangorda is a few metres up a
side street just off the waterfront, so it isn’t hard to find — and what a find it turned out to be. A hearty
lunch of seafood soup followed by peto with potatoes and salad then ice cream
for dessert plus lots of beer and a coffee cost only €22. If you’re planning a
visit, hurry up, because it’s probably pricing itself out of business.
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| SWELL OF A TIME: El Hierro's Atlantic rollers make the island an ideal destination for surfers |
El Hierro is famed for its
varied and wonderful landscapes. If your idea of a good time involves hiking,
climbing, cycling, surfing, windsurfing, kayaking or scuba diving (I’m
exhausted just writing that) you’ll be spoilt for choice. Nobody goes there for
sunbathing, which is available in abundance on neighbouring Tenerife, a half-hour
island-hopper flight away. Rather, visitors to El Hierro are active — like the underwater fissure a couple of
kilometres off La Restinga that erupted in the summer of 2011.
For several weeks the sea
bubbled and boiled like a big pot of porridge while the massive crack 900
metres below the waves spewed lava. As the unseen underwater volcanic cone
grew, finally stopping 100 metres short of the surface, it sent flames and
clouds of smoke billowing from the water. Language teacher and part-time guide Peter
Andermann, who’s lived on El Hierro for the past six years, said the fiery explosions were like “sneezes from
hell”. The fissuremen — I mean, fishermen
— who couldn’t leave port to earn a
living weren’t at all happy, but a waiter in La Vieja Pangorda told me the
restaurant saved a fortune on gas and electricity when the peto shot out of the
sea ready-cooked. Fortunately, the subterranean volcano has gone to sleep,
which is good news for Peter and his wife as they’re building a house on the
island they call home.
If any submarine skippers at a loose end are reading this, there’s a job
waiting to be filled in La Restinga. A few summers ago, the tourism authorities
thought it would be a good idea to buy a mini submarine so tourists could have
a look at the marine life beneath the waves. It was a hefty investment, but
such underwater excursions are a big attraction in other holiday destinations,
so the cheque was sent and the vessel delivered. Unfortunately, submarine
skippers are few and far between in El Hierro (population 10,000), so until one is found it will continue to sit
unlaunched and idle under a tarpaulin on the quayside, thus depriving would-be
Jacques Cousteaus of the chance to sing “We all live in a Hierro submarine”.
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| ROAM-ANTIC: A sunset stroll along the beach |
The absence of light
pollution — and around 280 cloudless
nights a year — attract amateur and
professional astronomers from all over the world. El Hierro’s location, and
that of the island group in general, in the Atlantic off Western Sahara, means much
of the northern hemisphere’s and many of the southern hemisphere’s
constellations — including the first signs of
the Southern Cross — can be seen year-round. The last time I saw so many
stars was during my short-lived soccer career when I rose majestically for an
in-swinging corner kick with the sun in my eyes and headed the goalpost instead
of the ball. On a good night, the inky sky is a riot of twinkling pin pricks,
like something Jackson Pollock in one of his angrier moods might have produced
with a black canvas and a bucket of white emulsion. If you want to see shooting
stars, this is the place to go.
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| BRIDGE OF SEIS: Rock spewed from a volcano forms an arch and, below, the El Golfo coast |
Birders flock to El Hierro
too — they’ll be jealous to know that I
watched as an osprey streaked from on high like a missile to pluck its lunch
from the sea. As it made to fly off with a fat fish writhing in its talons, a
pair of pesky ravens tried to intervene. They were on a hiding to nothing. With
a couple of flaps of its huge wings, the osprey brushed them aside and shot off
into the sun. I also saw several kestrels take lizards that had been caught
dozily unaware while basking on rocks. One strike was so close to where I stood
that I jumped back, but my surprise was nothing compared with the lizard’s.
The involuntary
introduction 50 years ago of voracious red ants to El Hierro put paid to the
fortunes of most ground-nesting species, but there’s still plenty of birdlife
to be seen, including doves, owls, hoopoes, chaffinches and crested tits. The
island’s wild canaries won’t be winning any beauty contests with their
uninspiring greenish-grey plumage, but if you’re in the vicinity when several
of them get together for a sing-song, you’re in for a treat. And a tweet. (The
Canaries get their name not from this most mellifluous of songbirds but from the
Latin Canariae Insulae, which translates as Island of Dogs; Mauritanian king
Juba II is credited with giving the islands their name because they were home
to “vast multitudes of dogs of very large size”. Indeed, the island group’s
coat of arms depicts a shield supported by two dogs; so the birds are named
after the islands rather than the other way around.)
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| HIGH CHURCH: The hilltop Candelaria Church at Frontera and, below, the Mirador de la Pena observation point and restaurant |
For watchers of larger
wildlife, whales are the biggest draw in more ways than one. What these gentle
giants lack in the show-off antics of the dolphins that often accompany them,
they more than make up for in gracefulness. If you’re lucky you can spy them
from the shore, but if you’re wise you’ll pay a few euro to hop on a boat and
see them up close.
With little traffic and no
industries pumping smoke and fumes into the atmosphere, the air on El Hierro is
as fresh as the peto on the blackboard. It’s thinner up in the 1,000-metre-plus
mountains, which makes the views from the observation terraces even more
breathtaking. One of the climatic quirks of being so high is that the
atmosphere up there in the afternoon is warmer than it is at sea level, so
you’re often above the clouds. It’s weird, but it makes for some fabulous
photos, which could be passed off as having been taken from a plane. You’ll go
home with pictures of rust-red and black lava fields, volcanoes and vast
expanses of lush green forests clinging to the slopes.
Even weirder are the fire-resistant Canary Pines, appropriately called Fenix
Canarias in Latin, which grow only at altitude. Like the mythical Phoenix that rose from the
flames and from which they get their name, they refuse to burn, even in the
fiercest of forest fires, so any arsonists seeking their 15 minutes of fame are
sparking up the wrong trees. Because of the lack of precipitation, the pines
get their water from passing clouds which then drips from the needles and is absorbed
by the roots. I thought Peter the guide was joking when he said a drinks firm
will soon begin bottling these drips for sale as “Horizontal Rain”, but it’s true.
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| TRUNK AND DISORDERLY: One of El Hierro's famous bent-double ancient juniper trees |
The towering, tough guy pines are nothing much to look at —
they’re really just telegraph poles with their clothes on — but in the west of
El Hierro, the remnants of the ancient juniper forest are something to behold.
The few feeble-looking trees (sabin juniper), some of them more than 500 years
old, are gnarled and bowed, and their wind-lashed and warped trunks are bent
double. Their greenery — or, more accurately, brownery — when nudged awake by a
breeze sweeps the dry stony soil that surrounds them like a skivvy with a broom,
and they suddenly and briefly look alive. The remarkable thing is, they are
alive. Sap still runs — well, probably plods, coughing and spluttering —
through their sun-bleached boughs.
A car, or a bike if you
have the legs of a Tour de France rider, is a must for making the most of a
visit to El Hierro, which is served by daily flights (www.bintercanarias.com) from Tenerife, Gran Canaria
and La Palma and ferries (www.fredolsen.com)
from Tenerife. Book your vehicle — well ahead in
the summer — for collection at the port of La Estaca or the airport (www.gomera-individual.com). Accommodation ranges from simple pensiones to
rural guesthouses and hotels, including the 4-star parador, so there’s
something to suit every pocket. Keep in mind, though, that because so much of
your time will be spent out and about exploring, there’s no great need to go
above mid-budget B&B. There are 1,500 guest beds on the island, and demand
for them at Easter and in summer is great, so again, book well ahead.
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| END OF THE LINE: Orchilla lighthouse used to mark the Zero Meridian line of longitude |
Close to the 3-star Hotel
Balneario Pozo de la Salud where I stayed is the Orchilla lighthouse, which
lies in the shadow of a small extinct volcano (they
come in all sizes, from hillock to mountain). Until the Americas were
discovered, the spit of land on which the lighthouse sits was considered to be the
westernmost end of the known world. What lay beyond, if anything, was a mystery,
though dragons were often mentioned. In 1634 it was officially set as the Zero
Meridian (15 centuries after that old Greek know-all Ptolemy set it unofficially),
which it remained for 250 years until that classification passed to Greenwich.
Today you can stand beneath
the lighthouse and look west, knowing that a long way over the horizon lies
Florida. Before you, visitors to Miami are lying on sunbeds, tucking into
hotdogs and being scared witless on the theme park rides. Behind you, visitors
to El Hierro are sitting outside La Vieja Pangorda, tucking into a big plate of
peto while a maid who was scared witless by a dusty likeness of me on a
bedsheet is lying on a counsellor’s couch.
I left an impression on the
linen, but the Canary Islands’ Magnificent Seventh left an even bigger
impression on me.
FLY
Aer Lingus flies four times a week from Dublin and once a week from Cork
to Tenerife, and once a week from Dublin and Cork to Gran Canaria (www.aerlingus.com).
STAY
Dublin-based outdoor adventure
specialists Camino Ways organise walking holidays in El Hierro. See www.caminoways.com
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| POZ FOR THOUGHT: Hotel Balneario Pozo de la Salud and, below, swimming in the seawater pool at La Maceta |
