Gorge and the dragon

9 January 2017

Our room at Casa los Herrera is pretty good. The hotel is an old restored building opposite the little church in what perhaps passes as the centre of Hermigua, which is more like a set of contiguous hamlets winding down the valley bottom than a proper town. The room is handsome with plenty of storage but mysteriously no chairs nor a desk. The central courtyard is cool. And breakfasts are good and generous enough that we can make ourselves a lunchtime bocadillo out of the bread, meat and cheese. They have a shiny new Nespresso machine but no working WiFi.

Today we hiked down the Guarimiar gorge, and if there’s a more impressive hike on the island I will be… well… impressed! The village of Imada at the top was pretty enough, but the lower gorge was gorgeous and epic in scale. Especially for such a tiny island. Of course, what goes down must come up, and the second part of the hike was a near vertical trail up pretty much a volcanic cliff.

The astonishing thing about the climb was just how good the trail was. Many of the trails, or caminos, on La Gomera are very old and were used to travel between villages in days of yore, but there must have been an enormous amount of restoration and improvement work in recent years because every hike so far has been on excellent and easily followed trails. Oh, and there are neat little signposts at pretty much every possible junction that would put most English national parks to shame. This island really is laid out for walkers.

Still, we’ve only seen a bare handful of other people on every walk we’ve done.

We extended this hike to take in La Gomera’s only dragon tree. Very cool trees, but I would say not worth the number of extra steps down (and up) that this detour added.

Fresh fish in Restaurate El Faro tonight, which was good but no better than our local Telemaco.

Related Images:

This entry was posted on Friday, January 20th, 2017 at 12:17 am 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.