Other places in La Gomera

Hermigua Valle Gran Rey

The end of the world as they knew it

From the Mail on Sunday
When Christopher Columbus sailed from the Atlantic island of La Gomera in August 1492, he did not know whether he was going to find the New World or fall off the edge of the old one.
The small, humped island was his last landfall. They still say there that he spent a night of passion with a Spanish noblewoman who ordered a fireworks display as a farewell.
On the big neighbouring island of Tenerife, the volcano Teide was erupting. Columbus's sailors, many of whom still believed fervently that the Earth was flat, muttered. The omens were not good.
Just over 500 years later Mount Teide sat quiet as the morning, a small blob of cloud sitting on its head like a woolly hat.
It was winter but this far south it was like June as we set out for La Gomera from Los Cristianos on Tenerife, the sea and the sky dove grey, the sun flicking across waves that were no more than ripples.
Dolphins wallowed in a sort of half-interested way around the ferry and a family of pilot whales held up their tails, each tail like an ace of spades.
La Gomera was in sight from the start, although the ferry voyage would take an hour and a half.
In the way of islands, it had seemed to be moody, as to whether or not to show itself: on some days entirely vanishing and then sitting there clear and sturdy in precisely the same place.
As we voyaged, engulfed on deck by Spanish families with camcorders, gabbling bits of amateur commentary as they filmed Uncle Jose and Auntie Maria patting a lifeboat, I was watching the island changing colour and contour as we neared - moving, it seemed, like a dancer performing the slow Spanish saraband.
It was tall, rising at its middle to 5,000ft. An aeroplane appeared, navigating towards the mist and mountains. The new airport is up there - somewhere - its short runway fitted into the shadows. People continue (perhaps understandably) to travel by sea.

Read more in our destination guide to La Gomera.