We have now left La Gomera and are setting ourselves up in Santa Cruz, La Palma which we visited in 2019 and thoroughly enjoyed.
So what did we think of La Gomera? It is great, the island is small so in the space of 18 days we got to know it quite well.
Although the Canaries are regarded as an all year destination some places seemed a little dead, whether this is because of covid or some other factor it is hard to tell. A good example was a very picturesque village called Agulo pictured above. It is mentioned in all the tourist blurb and was recommended by our hotel. The narrow streets have plenty of character, it has a pebble beach close by, but on our visit none of the restaurants looked like they would open anytime soon so not a good place to stay.
It is in fact two villages with a dried river bed between them. Over time there has been a great deal of rivalry between the two sides and every year they used to have a day of being rude, each village would hurl insults across the divide including special songs or poems written for the occasion and the other side would “return fire”.
It sounded like a good fun festival but a few years ago it stopped because of lack of interest in anyone running it. A bit sad, perhaps a sign of the times.
Whilst La Gomera is supposed to be warm and sunny all year up in the hills (3,000ft) it can be a little cool and damp in December / January but the main town in the centre called Vallehermoso looked like a good place to base oneself in summer when the coast might be a little too warm.
The two places we stayed, San Sebastian and Valle Gran Rey were both friendly busy towns with plenty of restaurants, shops and places to stay. Although all the locals are very covid aware there seemed no animosity to us nasty foreigners who might be importing germs. There are no nice beaches on the island and the airport is small so it is not somewhere the mainstream tourists come which is why it is so nice. Tui do La Gomera holidays but fly into Tenerife, bus the customers to the ferry which then brings them across to the island, the same route we took.
The walking is superb, we used a book called Walk La Gomera which has 34 walks graded 1 (Easy) to 5 (Strenuous) although after writing this I noticed there are no grade 1’s listed, perhaps people who buy walking books won't do "Easy" walks. We managed eight of the walks all 3’s and 4’s. All the footpaths are well signposted and many are old donkey trails between the villages like the one shown here.
If we get confined to the Canaries for longer than planned we might go back.
Because of covid the ferry over to La Palma was almost empty, a large ship with about 20 customers. It did go up and down quite a lot because as soon as you leave the harbour you are in the middle of the Atlantic so not long after this picture was taken we moved to the centre of the ship.
We were hoping to have a nice cup of tea on arrival at our new apartment but disaster - it is Sunday, all the shops are closed and we cannot get any milk. Fortunately we do have wine, gin and a few cans of tonic.