We have been well and truly hit by storm Filomena over the past two days, fog, torrential rain 60mph winds and very big waves crashing on the beach about 100 yards from our house. The river, which is normally dry, has deposited tons of wood into the sea. We met an English lady who has been here 10 years and has never seen water in the river before. The Council have put up hazard tape to close off the beach but everyone seems to ignore that, as you can see the fresh supply of sticks are ideal for beach encampments and I don’t think anyone would be mad enough to go swimming.
The wind was so strong yesterday that one of the ferries ran aground in Gran Canaria and all the flights from La Palma were either cancelled of delayed, there were a lot of unhappy Germans who were stuck and wanted to get home.
There has been snow up on the top of the mountain where we were last week (at 7,700ft) but down here it is very warm, tee shirt weather, but once an hour it rains so we can risk a coffee or a beer outside but it is pushing it a bit to order a meal. Supposedly it will be gone by tomorrow and we can reliably eat outside. We hope so as we have used the downtime to research E-bike hirers and now have a couple of cycling expeditions planned when the weather improves.
The rainbow picture also shows the cliffs above our village. When we arrived there was some small barriers closing off the end of the promenade where there were some fancy restaurants which have been closed down. We, like everyone else ignored the barriers and just walked through. Yesterday much bigger steel barriers were erected and people keep looking up at the cliff. We assume they are expecting a rock fall, quite exciting.
The authorities here have been worrying about "Christmas Covid Bounce", or a sudden increase in infections caused by family gatherings, so far in La Palma there have not been many infections (21 per 100,000 people) so fingers crossed it stays that way.
The UK government are now saying we will need to have covid tests before being allowed back into the country, another good reason not to rush things.