Delighted expletives fell from my mouth like bombs as I drove up the mountain towards the center of Gran Canaria. An impossibly tight and steep S-curve reared in front of my freshly-hired SUV and I could see neither the road above the curve nor the cliff edge beneath my right front wheel, but I had no other choice, so I white-knuckled around both curves and then bailed into the nearest pull-off to breathe. The tired engine gave a metallic tink-tink as it cooled in the almost-silent air. I stood on the centerline of the abandoned road. The late-afternoon sun already touched the mountain behind me and I stood in shadow, but below me the entire eastern coast of the island blazed as a golden wave that flowed from my feet all the way down to the Atlantic. Coming from German late-winter, I was shocked by all the Canarian mid-spring life that burst from the arid landscape. Cactus-flower crowns perfumed the clean dry air, and when a hidden butterfly leapt from one, my heart leapt with it and my eyes followed its nectar-drunk path as it fluttered up into the blue.
Before my nerves had even fully settled, I was back behind the wheel, excited to see what lay beyond the shadowed ridge. After the clear blue skies of the eastern coast, I was not expecting to be engulfed in a bank of fog right when I crested the top. Even less was I expecting the forest of almond trees that swam out of the fog, their spindly branches laden with flowers whose colors ranged a pink-hued rainbow from rose to magenta. I dove into the next pull-off to take pictures. It was clearly going to take me forever to drive anywhere on the island. On the heels of the almond forest came a misty mountain-top Canary Island pine forest, looking wildly out of place in the high desert as it grew out of what looked like bare volcanic tufa rock. I squinted directly into the sun as I abruptly shot out of the cloud and back into blue-sky territory. A new mist-soaked valley yawned to my right, spilling all the way from my tires down to the North coast of the island, many miles away.
The views only got better from there.
Highland Heart
My week-long itinerary for Gran Canaria had, as usual, been cobbled together through various Internet searches and blogs and videos, and was therefore mostly devoid of logic. I decided to start in the quiet mountain highlands at the center of the island for a little hiking retreat, which was maybe an odd first choice on a subtropical island rimmed with ocean and beaches, but I am who I am.
I dallied so much on the drive up that the sunset show had already started by the time I arrived at my lodge. Mountains always draw an introspective hiking-and-biking adventure crowd, and when I arrived they were all quietly sitting on the veranda to watch the celestial play. Everything had a tangerine glow: the cacti, the free-roaming cats, and the volcanic peaks sawing at the sky all around us. The western sky filled with a glittering shard of the Atlantic and the low dark smudge of Tenerife, and I watched as the color wheel spun towards pink. The sun ducked behind Roque Bentayga, the eroded finger of a long-dead volcano, and popped back out just long enough to say goodbye before it was lost over the horizon to the Americas. Fog rose from the valley floor in a tidal wave the moment it was gone, and night fell to meet it, closing a curtain over the day.
Vacation-mode insomnia had me strapped into my hiking boots before the morning sun had even cleared the eastern rim of the caldera. Every inhale of my hike towards the mountain town of Tejeda was laced with the perfume of almond and thistle flowers, with undertones of hot car brakes and expired sunscreen (whoops) and spring allergies. I sneezed. Absent was the scent of the sea, perhaps not surprising since it was miles away across the desert. The songs of warblers and dogs filled my ears, mixed with crowing roosters and…an American turkey? I swiveled. Yes indeed, there he was, inexplicably gobbling away behind a rusting fence. This natural music was punctuated with a few omnipresent notes of Spanish-flavored music, origin unknown. The sizzling sun threw the world into sharp relief, from the tiny lizards skittering underfoot to the prickly pear cacti and agave flowers towering overhead. I headed down, down, down the blinding white stone path, vaguely registering that I would have to come all the way back up, up, up.
Of all the things I thought I’d find in a historic mountaintop village of a mostly-desert island, an artisanal cheese festival attended by 40 different local farmers wasn’t it. Or at least it wasn’t until I remembered that among the dog-and-rooster music, I’d also heard distant goat bells. A gauntlet of farmers brandished plates of free samples at me and I curiously picked at them, a bit gun-shy after trying one too many French cheeses that had offended my unrefined and cheddar-loving American palette. I knew enough to seek out the Flor de Guía cheese, a Gran Canaria-specific delicacy that’s coagulated using local thistle flowers. I liked it, but I didn’t think carrying soft cheese in my backpack through the hot desert was a great idea.
It was only noon by the time I returned to home base (is this how morning people feel all the time?), so I spent the back half of the day up along the caldera’s rim, where vertigo and mist became my constant companions. At one point I found myself driving uphill into a hairpin curve but looking out the passenger window and downhill to check the road ahead of me. Hiking the rim trail to the prehistoric Cuevas de Caballero caves was little improvement, since the path followed the knife’s edge of the caldera, where I was usually just one misstep away from tumbling straight into the valley below. Oceanic fog rolled in and out below me, giving the impression that I was in a window seat and flying high above the clouds, only it was a thousand times better because I was completely alone and actually comfortable and the air smelled of nectar rather than unwashed humanity. Then the fog below began to flow upwards along the cliff face that I stood on top of, becoming an upside-down waterfall of vapor falling past me into space. Caught somewhere between feeling like a bat hanging from Earth and a clumsy human about to fall into a valley, I scooched away from the edge before the vertigo could claim me.
North Coast
Humanity and time have not been overly kind to the Canaries’ laurisilva forest, an endemic subtropical rainforest habitat that exists now only in the Canary, Azores, and Madeira islands of the North Atlantic. On Gran Canaria, there are only a few scraps1 of this living-fossil forest left, tucked into narrow high-elevation valleys where the sun can’t quite bake it to death and the rain still falls with some regularity, thanks to tradewinds and a rain cycle that’s influenced by the forest itself. Halfway between the highlands and North coast, wedged between banana plantations and whitewashed mountaintop villages, I stopped to check out a pocket of laurisiva at the Reserva Natural Especial de los Tilos. I wasn’t aware how dry the island’s air was until I got out of the car and felt the forest’s cool fragrant mist settle on my already-sunburned cheeks. The trail was a short and sweet one through a little slice of heaven, where cacti and spring flowers grew up among the evergreen trees’ roots.
Gran Canaria’s northern coast is constantly bombarded by waves that scream in from the Arctic. Its “beaches” are sharp black rocky affairs, full of critter-filled tide pools that double as human swimming pools for the brave. As I walked up to the pools at El Roque, a young boy cannon-balled from high atop a boulder, yelling at his Earth-bound mother to watch his performance. Balancing on the sharp and slippery volcanic rock in flip-flops, with my smartphone in one hand and camera in the other, I flailed my way around in search of sea creatures. With two free fingers I gripped at a boulder and in return its rough surface gripped my fingerprints like the barbs on a cat’s tongue. I recoiled when part of the rock detached itself and scuttled away, then boomeranged back when I realized the broken rock was actually a crab. Waves boomed against the basalt shore, and anemones pulsed in the cold water beneath my toes. I could not have asked for a more perfect beach.
East Coast
Or at least, not until I heard about the glorious black-sand beach at Güigüi. Surrounded by an unbroken amphitheater of mountains, the beach can only be reached by foot or by sea, and I quickly discovered that the by-foot method was a doozy. It was only 8 a.m., but the sun hadn’t gotten the memo. As I climbed up a desert and mostly-deserted mountain path, I greedily clung to any scrap of shade I could find. I huddled inside tiny caves in the cliff walls and under many-armed cacti, scanning the ground for any fallen spines before I sat. There were a few other early-birds on the trail with me who I kept leapfrogging between our respective breaks: a woman with her spry dog, and a hippie with an overloaded backpack, who I guessed was one of the de facto inhabitants of the remote beach I was headed for. The rocky path was steep enough that within twenty minutes, the sound of blood racing through my ears wasn’t so much a percussive thump as it was the ultra-quick woo-woo of a fetal heartbeat heard through an ultrasound.
As I walked, I found myself having a conversation with myself:
“So…what are we doing?”
“Hiking up, and then down, a mountain. Twice. To get to a beach.”
“A beach. Like the ones we’ve been driving past for days?”
“…yes.”
“…we’ll talk about this when we get home.”
The grumpier side of me changed her tune when we reached the top of the ridge and a cool oceanic breeze arrived, soothing both the rivers of sweat pouring off me and my temper. Finally of one mind again, I walked through a human-sized notch to the next valley. The punishing sun behind me illuminated the entire valley below, all reds and blacks and tans, reaching aaallll the way down to the coast and the distant smudge of Güigüi beach. Far from being lifeless, the desert blushed with the luminescent green of fresh spring growth, and these were no ordinary plants: the isolated Canaries are home to dozens of unique species that are found nowhere else on Earth, just like the Galapagos. The endemic plants, I’ll admit, are also the main reason I’d picked Gran Canaria in the first place. Bio nerds unite!
That afternoon the beach hosted me and maybe 25 other intrepid hikers, including a woman who came all the way in plastic flip-flops that looked like they’d hardly be comfortable in a nightclub, and a man who hiked in a banana hammock and carried nothing besides a bottle of water. Being an over-prepared woman who carries at least 5 kilos of stuff literally anywhere I go, even just down the street to the grocery store, I couldn’t relate. I pulled out my swimsuit and towel and goggles and snacks and (new) sunscreen before I was ready to wade out into the rough breakers that were tearing up the dark shore. Mindful of the undertow and not particularly keen on taking a one-way trip to Tenerife or perhaps the Americas, I stopped once I was waist-deep. Even so I could hardly keep my feet underneath me, and I had to jump over or dive through each wave to avoid being knocked over. And then I made the same long journey but in reverse, hiking all the way back up through the rainbow desert whose colors had only grown richer in the mid-afternoon light, back through the human-sized notch in the ridge, and back down the other side.
South Coast
The island’s character began to melt away as I drove towards the sunnier and busier South Coast. The narrow and meandering 1.5-lane roads of the north morphed into 4-lane divided highways that punched straight through the hillsides. Speed limits shot from 40 to 120 kilometers an hour, and cars materialized from nowhere to fill all the extra road space. And all these straight busy roads led to Maspalomas, the unabashed Miami of Gran Canaria. I’d almost skipped the resort town of Maspalomas, but I couldn’t escape the pull of its one magnetic attraction: a protected seaside dune system that’s sometimes called the Little Sahara2. Many years of living near the Great Lakes dunes and the Outer Banks of North Carolina in the U.S. have made it hard for me to pass up a good dune system.
I’ll spare you the details of my night spent in Maspalomas and cut straight to my early-morning exodus to the dunes. I endured my flip-flops just long enough to transit the concrete maze of copy-paste skyscraper resorts with their identical turquoise pools. Civilization finally ended and I wiggled my toes deep into golden sand that was still cool to the touch. Frozen ripples of sand that had been sculpted by the wind and then decorated overnight with frog and lizard footprints flowed off to the horizon. I followed them into the little slice of wilderness. A choose-my-own-adventure story began and I followed a series of looping ridges that diverged in a dozen directions and came back together. As I swirled back and forth through the tiny desert, I oriented myself whenever I emerged from a hollow by finding either the line of city palm trees on one side or the thin glitter of the distant Atlantic on the other. The famous Atlantic winds had somehow avoided me until that day, and they made up for it by quickly sandblasting my ankles smooth. It was still nothing compared to the exfoliation that ravaged my heels.
On the way back, I swung wide of town to stick my now-baby-smooth toes in the sea. As soon as the first ocean wave kissed my feet I was also engulfed in a wave of humans, who were walking back and forth along the beach for miles with no discernible destination. I guessed they were all just out for a long walk, but I’d never seen so many people doing it all at once. There was a veritable Neapolitan sundae of humans: vanilla fresh-off-the-plane Brits, strawberry been-here-a-few-days Germans, chocolate what-is-sunscreen residents. It was still early enough that the night’s chill lingered and almost no one was actually lounging on the windy beach yet, with the notable exception of a few jam-packed nudist colonies. Rows of lounge chairs were tucked behind burlap barriers whose only discernible purpose was to shield the nudists from being sandblasted, because they were not at all worried about their privacy. Leather-tanned naked people meandered back and forth between their burlap sanctuaries and the sea, moving perpendicular to the human superhighway I was on, like so many deer crossing a road. Dodging them became a sport. As much as my opinion about public nudity has mellowed since moving to Europe, I figured that was a collision best avoided.
Snorkeling the West Coast to Las Palmas
Tufia is a whitewashed village clinging to a cliff face above a maroon crescent bay that’s filled with subtropical sea life. Oh, and it was founded by outlaws. In other words, I loved Tufia before I even arrived. Narrow streets reminiscent of a Greek island led me to a slip of black-sand beach that was soaking up every spare degree of heat the sun could throw at it. My feet were aflame by the time I dropped my things, and I hot-footed it to the sea, where I mingled with packs of SCUBA divers who were tooling around near the cliffs. I put my begoggled face in the water, and it felt like I’d suddenly opened my eyes after being in a very long coma. A shivering rainbow made entirely of fish filled the sea that supported me. Pufferfish-like boxfish and packs of needlefish hovered just out of arm’s reach, watching me with one eye each, seemingly as curious about me as I was of them. An army of chunky parrotfish munched on the rocks, making my ears crackle with something like static. Someone who shall remain unnamed had failed to check if the battery on the underwater camera was full that day, so I settled into an unbroken meditation-like state, floating on the surface of the wild Atlantic and content to simply see.
My round-trip route finally came to a close at Gran Canaria’s capital city of Las Palmas, which is a love letter written to the Las Canteras beach. Sheltered by a rocky barrier reef that eats most of the incoming swell and creates a calm lagoon, both the town and sandy beach stretch for miles along the coast. A staircase down from the Main Street promenade led me to one of the cove-like beaches that all join together at low tide but break into separate islands at high. I strapped on my goggles to follow an underwater “hiking trail” past all the spots where the local fish hang out (dive bars, if you will…). It led me out to the exposed barrier reef, standing in water just a few feet deep, which gave me a nice place to perch out of the water and sun myself for awhile3. For all the air’s warmth, Gran Canaria is still a seamount in the middle of the Atlantic, and after 15 minutes of submersion I was shivering from both the cold and the joy of seeing so many fish.
If I had to describe Gran Canaria in 4 words or less, I would maybe say “a place for wandering.” It was a stroke of luck not really having a set itinerary, since every bend in the road seemed to bring new opportunities for exploring things I’d never imagined could exist. Another option could be “rainbows everywhere you look.” All things cosmic, geologic, anthropic, and biotic contained dozens more colors than I would have expected. In fact the reality of the island divorced from my expectations almost immediately, when I landed and saw up-close how much life the island contained, in stark contrast to the arid first impression I got on the flight in. The adventure-ready beaches were just as much fun for me as the hiking trails (not something I experience often), and the deserts were just as beautiful as the forests (high praise from a forest biologist). In other words, I’d go back – just as soon as I’ve seen the other Canary Islands.
- If you’re really into forest hiking or want to see the world’s largest intact laurisilva forest, which is also a UNESCO world heritage site, I highly recommend the island of Madeira to the north of the Canaries. ↩︎
- The sand actually comes from volcanic erosion and marine life, not the Sahara Desert, even though the Sahara is just a few hundred kilometers away. ↩︎
- It’s safe to sit or walk on because it’s just bare rock, not fragile coral. ↩︎
Window Seat Odyssey 
Leave a comment