Farewell La Gomera

14th January 2017

Home today, not much to say. One more tasty breakfast at Casa los Herreras, one more time we turned the bread, cheese and ham into a sandwich for our lunch (much easier than faffing with local supermarkets, our breakfasts were so large we could always use half of it as our hiking lunch!). One more drive along the windy mountain roads, with one more stop for an epic view and a photo.

At San Sebastian we loitered a while in a souvenir shop near the harbour, but couldn’t find anything local worth buying apart from a box of sweet biscuits. Well, the island is only 24km across! Just about the only acknowledged “local handicraft” is the pottery found at El Cercado, the village above Valle Gran Rey, and this pottery is basically brown and entirely utilitarian. Kinda what you’d expect.

So the main thing to take away is memories. I’ve had a little read-up, now we’ve finally found WiFi, and La Gomera has a surprisingly long history – first settled by Berbers a couple of thousand years ago, then colonised by the Spanish in the 15th century. It was even Columbus’ final stop-off before he set sail across the endless Atlantic to the New World.

Utterly bizarre occurrence on the ferry back to Tenerife – a few miles from land, hundreds upon hundreds of pigeons were suddenly released from a lorry in the car deck (we saw it loaded) and they formed swirling silvery flocks as they started to make their way back to the tiny island in the distance. Training exercise? Accident? No idea!

Tenerife was an astonishing contrast. Two-lane roads. Massive billboards. Thai restaurants. Giant modular apartment blocks. I’ll say this quietly, for fear of upsetting some readers, but: yuck.

Give me La Gomera any day!

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 20th, 2017 at 10:30 pm and is filed under Spain. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.