Two takes on La Gomera

Although the pebble beaches (some should be described as boulder beaches) and black sands are not to everyone’s taste, the seas were clear and blue, our hotel was luxurious and one could always escape from the hot sun into the cool interior of the planet’s most ancient laurel forest, a world heritage site.

The island is shrouded in historical intrigue — it is rumoured that Christopher Columbus enjoyed romantic trysts with La Gomera’s beauteous ruler Beatriz de Bobadilla. He dallied here for a month before his maiden voyage in 1492 to the New World. Given that the port in the island’s capital, San Sebastian, was relatively ill-equipped, the curious decision can apparently only be explained by, ahem, non-maritime interests.

Lovers of peculiar traditions will also find much to amuse them — before telephones,Gomeran whistling was a common form of communication across the peaks and valleys, with regions developing different dialects. Now virtually dead, the art is revived for festival days and tourist shows.

Much of the tourist action is concentrated on the west of the island around Valle Gran Rey, which has sandy beaches and a few hotels. But La Gomera is far from overrun; most visitors are Spaniards on short breaks, or Germans, and a few adventurous day-trippers from Tenerife.

As Tom and I slumped on the veranda in the evenings, having installed Rosa in her comfortable cot, sipping gin and looking beyond the bougainvillea at the moonlight flickering on the dark sea, we felt we had truly got away from it all.

Our first two days were spent chilling out at our hotel, Jardin Tecina. Most of the hotel, built in a vaguely Alpine style by Norwegian shipping magnate Fred Olsen, is sited spectacularly on the cliffs above Playa del Santiago. It boasts restaurants, bars, a few shops, a children’s club with well-equipped activity room, a café, tennis courts, three pools and a fitness and beauty centre. Beyond the bar, which features nightly entertainment, such as live bands and strangely popular cocktail-mixing shows, there is a games room, library and disco.

Babysitters can be arranged through reception, who charge £7-£10 an hour. We found them unnecessary as Rosa seemed welcome everywhere at any hour and so many of the hotel guests had young children that our own vocal progeny didn’t stick out. The easiest option was eating in one of the hotel’s three restaurants, which serve local and international dishes.

One of our favourite features was a lift built into the cliffs for hotel guests that transported you down to sea level, where an extremely pebbly beach and another hotel wing awaited. A quieter alternative to the central pools, with a seawater pool, bar and restaurant, this was where the couples without kids tended to hang out.

A service road leads, via two beach shacks, to the tiny town, with its handful of tapas bars and restaurants. The shacks are well worth a stop — we whiled away an hour with cool beers and delicious fish croquettes, and the friendly proprietress conjured up a softly toasted cheese sandwich for a ravenous Rosa.

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Only by day three did we feel it was time to hit the roads — they are not for the car sick. Apart from this, driving is easy — there are only a handful of roads, all clearly signposted, and heading inland from any direction brings you to Parque Nacional de Garajonay.

The laurel forest is home to about 400 different species of flora and criss-crossed with walking and hiking trails of varying difficulty, from the simple to the vertiginous. They are mostly well-marked, although a walking map is recommended.

It is also worth finding out whether your chosen walk takes you out into the sun, and timing it appropriately. If you are staying under the canopy and if you can combine it with lunch, a two-hour ramble is an excellent strategy for the middle of the day.

Armed with a baby carrier and a recommendation from a friendly hotel rep, we attempted Las Creces, an hour-long delightful stroll through the woods. From there, a ten-minute drive took us to the clifftop restaurant at Chorros de Epina, where we dined pleasurably and cheaply on garlic-soaked squid and green mojo, a tangy green sauce that is to Gomerans what tomato ketchup is to Brits.

Our third walk took us outside the park to La Gomera’s only dragon tree, a gnarled species now unique to the Canaries and most famous for its blood-red sap. This exercise was a perfect illustration of how untouristy most of the island is — there was not a single sign on the road pointing to this major botanical attraction lurking down the valley.

It was not until we circumnavigated the island, admiring dramatic rock formations and taking in what seemed to be major towns such as Hermigua and Vallehermoso, that we realised how quiet our destination was.

La Gomera is the least populated island in the Canaries with about 18,000 people. Its capital, San Sebastian, is the largest town, and numbers only 5,000 inhabitants.

The wet, fertile north is host to banana plantations but the drier, southern half is waking up to the idea of tourism as an income source, so hotels are springing up. Fred. Olsen has certainly cottoned on to La Gomera’s appeal — a no-expense-spared golf course has been built next to Jardin Tecina, as well as a block of pricey luxury apartments.

My recommendation is to sample the island before it becomes too built up. There is little nightlife — this is a place for nature lovers, hikers, ramblers and families who like something a little different.

Need to know

Getting there: Anjana Ahuja travelled with Magic of Spain (0800 9803378, www.magicofspain.co.uk).

One week’s B&B stay at the Hotel Jardin Tecina starts at £680pp, based on two people sharing in November and includes flights to Tenerife, and onward taxi and ferry transfer to La Gomera. Half-board costs an extra £6pp a day. Infants who are under two years on the date of return, travel for £29 on charter flights and £59 on scheduled flights, if they sit on an adult’s lap on the plane. Cots can be booked in advance. Car hire can be booked either at the hotel or through Holiday Autos (0870 4000000, www.holidayautos.co.uk), which offers a week’s rental from about £85 when you book online. A child’s car seat can be rented for £2 a day, booked in advance but payable locally.

Reading: Tenerife & La Gomera (Rough Guides, £5.99). Southern Tenerife and La Gomera by Noel Rochford (Sunflower, £9.99); Canary Islands (Lonely Planet, £9.99).

Further information: Visit www.gomera-island.com.

Page 3: Bettina Selby vows to return to La Gomera

()Bettina Selby vows to return to La Gomera

The precipitous cliffs in no way prepared us for our first glimpse into the exuberantly green interior of La Gomera. A 45-minute sea crossing from the close-packed holiday complexes of Tenerife’s south-eastern corner and we were disembarking at Valle Grand Reyon the west side of the island The small colourful harbour with its adjacent black sand beach seemed a world away - wonderfully relaxed and inviting.

La Gomera is keen to preserve its identity, we learnt from the helpful tourist office. While welcoming visitors, it is determined not to be overwhelmed by numbers. This probably accounted for the delightfully slow-paced, old-fashioned atmosphere that immediately persuaded Peter and me to spend our remaining week there.

With less than 30 hotels on the whole island, self-catering apartments or rooms in private houses are the norm, and the four small hamlets of Valle Gran Rey are well supplied with both. Even so, in high season, and not having booked ahead, we were fortunate to find accommodation in La Caleta, the highest of them - a steeply-winding single street with flower-bedecked wooden balconies and stunning views. Our room was large and clean, sparsely-furnished with a few old family portraits and ancient rustic furniture.

The shower was shared by two other rooms, and basic cooking facilities meant we could have breakfasts on our covered balcony; fresh croissants which came from a well-stocked little store nearby. It was all delightfully redolent of 19th-century travel; considering the low cost, we were amazingly comfortable and we did not hanker after the more modern amenities available elsewhere in the valley.

Apart from breakfast, meals were catered for by numerous restaurants throughout the valley. Menus were simple and based largely on fish, straight from the sea, Canarian potatoes and salads with good Spanish wine. We were a20-minute stroll from the small black sand beaches of la Playa, Vueltas and Playa del Ingles. We usually ate by the sea in the evenings watching children fishing from the rocks and enjoying the sort of freedom that is so rarely possible these days. Sparsley populated and with only a very little slow-moving traffic, Valle Grand Rey seemed a particularly safe place for the very young.

Apart from leisurely meals and some ethnic music, there was not much in the way of evening entertainment. But since most visitors were on La Gomera for the trekking, lights tended to go out early. The second smallest island in the Canaries, La Gomera is so convoluted, so riven with valleys and spiked with mountains and rocky outcrops as to offer extensive scope and challenge for the fittest and most adventurous walker.

Peter and I do not come into this category, nor had we brought our walking boots, but trekking sandals proved adequate for all the well-marked and well-maintained treks we tackled - and even a few rougher patches. By judicious use of buses we were able to plan most of our walks along ridges with wonderful extensive views, or downhill through the many valleys radiating out from the summit to the sea.

Car hire was cheap, and useful for exploring the rest of the island on what must be among the most tortuous roads anywhere - all quite recently built. We drove just enough to get the geography straight and to know we had chosen the best centre for us. But we found a car little help for trekking, because of the difficulty of planning circular routes in such terrain. When buses did not connect with the end of our walks we thought we would hire a taxi, but never had to because, once back on tarmac, car drivers so frequently offered lifts.

La Gomera rises to 1487m and around this summit lies its chief glory - the Parque Nacional de Garajonay - a large and wonderful prehistoric rainforest; the last fragment of a mantle which once covered most of the Mediterranean world.

Now a unique Unesco World Heritage site it is strictly protected and a great place to explore; it takes a day to get across it and back and around its periphery are clearings with restaurants and amenities. The forest makes it own weather, attracting mists and moisture which in turn feed the island’s springs, and account for the overall green lushness of the island.

Although we began each day’s trek from the Parque, and were equipped with warm clothing and rainwear, we did not experience the famous Gomeran mist which is a part of all this moisture - wonderfully atmospheric but very cold.

We enjoyed the contrasts. From under the cool dim canopy, among the great variety of ancient trees, all draped in moss and lichen, we would emerge suddenly, into patches of bright sunlight with distant sea views of other islands and glimpses of jagged peaks and ravines below us. Some of the descents were very steep but within the Parque there were always steps or graded paths.

Below the Parque tiny fields in the wilderness gradually gave way to more extensive terracing of banana plantations and mixed agriculture. Winding tracks meandered down long valleys with the occasional small village, to end at last in a small sleepy town near the sea, with perhaps a small black sand beach for a swim. Each valley was very different and separated from the next by unique rocky wildernesses.

A week was not nearly enough for us to explore the whole island, nor did we manage a boat trip to the more spectacular cliffs. Nor did we to go on a mountain bike ride, or a free conducted walk. We had planned to go out with the whale and dolphin watchers of Club del Mar which undertakes marine research in the waters around The Canaries and which was rated very highly by other visitors, but the weather was not quite calm enough on the day. But there is always another time. With the most pleasant climate we have yet experienced and with such a laid-back away-from it-all atmosphere, La Gomera will certainly see us again.