These mist covered mountains

12 January 2017

It rained in the night. This morning we see a new side of La Gomera’s weather – it’s overcast, with plenty of mist and the occasional drizzle of rain. It’s even cloudy over the south western Valle Gran Rey, which is where we had settled on for today’s hike. We started up in El Cercado, to avoid the majority of fellow tourists, and it worked; we didn’t start to see lots of other hikers until about half way.

Of course with plenty of clouds and occasional drizzle this wasn’t likely to be our favourite hike, though the Valle Gran Rey is impressive from every angle. It’s as close to a tourist hot-spot as La Gomera gets, with a couple of beaches and all the associated bars and restaurants, and a decidedly hippie feel to it. But that did mean that on the second half of our hike we saw more fellow hikers than on all of our other hikes put together. I’m not exaggerating. At the same time, to put things in perspective we still saw a lot less folks than you’d see on a trek up Snowdon at pretty much any time of year. La Gomera really is nice and quiet. As well as astonishingly beautiful.

Even in the drizzle. And how often do you get to do a hike where you’re below the clouds one minute, and then as you climb it starts raining on you, and then you climb further and you’re in thick mist (or rather, you’re in the cloud and it’s presumably raining beneath you), and then you climb further and now you’re above those clouds and have blue sky again? Kinda magic.

The sheer crunchiness of the geography is kinda magic too. I mean, this island is 24km across (that’s 15 mins driving on a motorway) but it takes 1 hour 10 minutes to drive from the village of Agulo on one coast to Valle Gran Rey on the other. And that’s on good roads, not a pothole in sight. Or even better, the villages of

Tagaluche and Arure that are 1.5km apart but it takes 36 minutes to drive from one to the other! It also means we’ve done five great hikes, sometimes within a couple of kms of each other as the crow flies, but we’ve never crossed our tracks and I don’t think we’ve even really seen the same view twice. Flipping through the book I can see another half dozen full-length hikes we could do that would still make that true.

So, there’s plenty of reason to return another year! : )

Related Images:

This entry was posted on Friday, January 20th, 2017 at 8:48 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.