Canary Islands – El Hierro

El Hierro was the third of the Canary Islands where we spent time ashore. While Gran Canaria and Lanzarote had offered spectacular scenery and had been easy places to hang out and get boat work done, the ubiquitous mass tourism developments left both places feeling bland and soulless. Any place that names its roads after major tourism companies (we are talking about you Maspalomas) is clearly suffering from a lack of imagination.

El Hierro though was a wonderfully different place. Certainly, tourism is important on the island but it is a much more low-key affair, consisting largely of B&Bs and very small local hotels, allowing the agricultural and fishing flavour of the island’s community to come to the fore.

An impression of El Hierro

The island rises out of the sea in steep, baren rocky slopes and cliffs. In a few places, a negligible cove or the protection of a headland has encouraged the establishment of a small fishing community while higher up the slopes rock-walls protect rocky patches of ground that appear to be used in some undiscernible productive manner. Without anyone to be seen it was never possible to ask what that might have been and the bare ground and rocks gave nothing away.

For the majority of the community, however, life revolves around farming on the wetter windward and higher leeward slopes. Here, good grass cover made it easy to see that something could be grown, a lack of animals or obvious cultivation meant that it was still not clear what that might be. Nevertheless, there are plenty of these farms and the businesses in the handful of towns on the island seem to be focused on them and their activities.

What we can say is that there are definitely a few parmesan-like goat cheeses produced on the island along with a delicious El Hierro variant of the ubiquitous Canary Island green mojo sauce.

Another visitor from the Netherlands

A day after we had moored up in the harbour, Emiel, a friend from the Netherlands, arrived on the ferry to join us for a week.

Not being a sailor, he had absolutely no desire to do any sailing but instead was very keen on ocean swims, runs along the coast, snorkeling, hiking and birdwatching. These were just to while away the time however, as the main reason he had joined us here on El Hierro was to get some diving done.

Hiking

Before any diving got done though we took a day to walk in the laurel and pine forests that crown the rim of the upper slopes of the outside of the islands main crater.

The original forests would have been amazing: full of huge old, low bent, twisted, and wind-blown trees, heavily burdened with thick layers of moss and trailing dripping wreaths of lichens.

Sadly, these old forests were almost entirely cleared for firewood in the early colonial period and, despite the introduction of laws to regulate their use in the late 18^th century, it is only in the last 50 or 60 years that serious efforts have been made to re-establish them.

Birding

So extensive were these forests across the wetter Canary islands that there are two species of Columbid pigeon that are endemic to them, Columba junoniae and C. bollii. Of course, we demonstrated our superior birdwatching skills by managing to see neither of them.

Today, the thick forests of regrowth on the windward and higher leeward slopes of the crater provide a hint of the splendid wet forests that once must have been. We’ll just have to revisit the islands in a hundred years to get a better idea of how they would have looked in the 1500s and maybe even to get a glimpse of the two endemic columbids.

Diving

The port of La Restinga is tucked away on the very southern tip of El Hierro, just on the edge of what is locally known as the Mar de las Calmas, a marine protected area that sits in the calm waters of the island’s lee-shore.

Combined these two features have turned La Restinga into the island’s, and indeed the Canary Islands’, most important area for scuba diving. It’s renowned as a scuba diving site and that reputation was only enhanced when in 2011 a small volcanic eruption 2km offshore poured nutrients into local waters greatly enhancing the local marine life.

We had hoped to dive here from our own boat but the almost complete lack of anchorages and the coverage of Marine Reserves made this all a bit tricky so, instead we had booked ourselves in for two days of diving with a little (they all are) outfit that sat right on the harbour.

Each morning, we geared up in the shop before walking down to the zodiac and making a short trip out to the first of the day’s two dive sites. The dives were very relaxed, no fuss affairs: none of the Great Barrier Reef dive operator carrying-ons, just “this is the dive site, this is what we’ll do, let’s go”, and off we’d go. Very nice.

Four spectacular dive sites

And they were great dives, each quite different but all marked by dramatic lava formations, by a big open water feel and lots of fun fish.

Perhaps the best was an offshore dive (El Bajón) where we dropped in on the rim of the crater that had formed in 2011. This site was very exposed to both swell and a strong current, so could only be dived with the right conditions. Happily, those were the conditions we got on the second day.

The crater edge was at about 8m, abrupt and broken, and on either side, it fell away into deep blue water that just begged to be dropped into. Around the edge of the crater, hanging in the current were big schools of pelagics while close in, on and around the rocks, were the usual reef residents; blennies, grouper and many more. At the second dive site that day a big hammerhead shark was fishing on the surface when we arrived but failed to appear during the dive.

Waiting for the next weather window

After a week of swims, runs, walks, dives and birdwatching we bade farewell to Emiel and prepared for the 700nm crossing to Cabo Verde. The weather conditions, however, did not cooperate and so, along with a small flotilla of other boats, we spent a few days waiting for a weather window in which the winds were not too much more than 20kt and the waves were less than 4m high and only coming from one direction.

We spent this time by again renting a car and heading around to the other side of the island and into the collapsed crater that forms the NW side of the island. Here, in the bowl of the remaining half of the crater, is the community of La Frontera and surrounding it and running up the steep crater slopes, the main farming area of the island.

We took advantage of the ‘not-so-big smoke’ feel of the place by doing important cultural things like savouring some fine coffees in a small and rather artsy coffee shop and getting our first haircuts in 3 months from a fairly disinterested young Venezuelan.

This young fella confirmed for us that many of the locals were originally from Venezuela and, before that, originally from El Hierro, something we’d suspected based on the music we’d been hearing in various stores and bars.

He had come over from Venezuela because things were so bad over there and the “dictator made life impossible; he is an evil man”. He saw no prospect of things improving there without the US intervening. We finished the day off with a walk on the spectacular SW coast and a drive up the vertiginous ridge lines and back around the southern end of the island. Spectacular.