Travel: La Palma

So I’m going to 100% honest with you, before I started researching this holiday I hadn’t heard of La Palma. After a little research, and thinking about the time of year, it shot straight to the top of our list 🙂 alAs soon as we arrived we heard lots of stories about people thinking they were going to Las Palmas instead and then having to pay for a transfer having booked the hotel on the wrong island.

A little bit of background for you. La Palma is the most north-westerly island of the Canary Islands, Spain. La Palma is the fifth largest of the seven main Canary Islands. It’s highest mountain is the Roque de los Muchachos, at 2,426m, being second among the peaks of the Canaries only to the peaks of the Teide on Tenerife.

Star Gazing

One of the first activists we embarked upon was an astronomy evening. La Palma is world renowned for astronomy and you can see why! There is hardly any light pollution and when you’re up in the mountains there are no clouds either! Something which we discovered is not the case along the south-west coast. We spent the evening staring and the stars through telescopes and binoculars but to be honest you could still see all of the constellations without. Using the devices meant we got a really good look at the nebular within Orion and we could see hundreds of stars in the Seven Sisters group.

Around the Island

We began our day in the south of the Island before heading centrally to Roque de los Muchachos which is the highest point in La Palma at about 2,500m above sea level. As you drive up the winding roads you get some amazing views but the best are at the top. We went past all the the observatories, including the Magic twins (see photo below), before arriving at the top. Once there we followed a long, winding path (in reality it took about 30 mins as we were at high altitude) that became increasingly narrow until we were at the best view point. We were right inside the Caldera de Taburiente crater and the views were spectacular! After this we were hungry so continued to the small ‘ghost village‘ of San Andrés where we enjoyed a typical local lunch of fried goats cheese and salad. The final stop on our trip around the island was at the Zarza Cultural Park, the views here were also spectacular and a ‘must see’ if you visit the island. You get views looking up into the crater and the lush vegetation and dramatic landscape is very different to that on the rest of the canaries.