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...two travellers in search of the world's wildlife

28 February 2023

Wiggly, wiggly Anaga roads

My cold being in full effect, and the weather forecasting grey with a chance of showers, we settled on a driving tour today. The eastern tip of the island is the Anaga Peninsula, supposedly even more picturesque and mountainous than the Teno Peninsula in the north-west.

Taganana, one of the little sugar cube villages on the Anaga

For breakfast we found a chocolate con churros place in town. There is no finer breakfast than churros dipped in hot chocolate. We also took a ramble around La Laguna. It really is a proper old town, with 16th century churches, 17th century palazzos and a ruined Augustinian monastery, cobbled paving and old merchant houses now shop-fronts. Like it.

The Anaga Peninsula sure is popular! We gave up stopping at the info centre at Carmen de la Cruz to pick up a walking map because there was no space in the car park and even half a kilometre down the road there were still cars levered up onto every spare scrap of verge. I cannot conceive of this place in summer. Most of the villages strung out along the ridges and valleys are down dead-end roads, and some of them were also stacked up with cars parked on every available corner.

And oh, but the roads are wiggly. Wiggly, wiggly, wiggly. It can all get a bit hypnotic after a while… hairpin left, hairpin right, hairpin left, hairpin right, hairpin left, hairpin… oh, there’s a bus coming! We survived unscratched.

At the end of the wiggly roads is the sea

And I can’t really blame the place for being popular, the views are absolutely jaw-dropping. On both sides. All sides. Verdant valleys either filled with trees and bushes or with tiny farm terraces, many of them overgrown and long out of use. Each little village looks like a scattering of sugar cubes among the crags.

Down at the shore we had a lunch of grilled fish and fried octopus in one of those typical seafood restaurants of Mediterranean lands: a rather grubby looking kitchen lurking in the shadowy back, then a big open dining room with a concrete floor, zero decoration, plastic tables and huge perspex windows overlooking the sea. These are weirdly ubiquitous and I wish they’d just put a little thought into making it look like they care. Still, no complaints about the food.

Six villages, a hundred vistas and five hundred wiggles later we got back just on dusk. My favourite village was probably… Taganana. In honour of a big lunch, we just had takeaway pizza for dinner. It was a good one. This is an odd holiday for us: over five nights we’ve only actually eaten in a restaurant on two of them. Feels like being students again.

Wonderful views around every wiggly corner

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