THIS IS LA PALMA, AN ISLAND IN THE SKY. THE WORLD’S ASTROPHYSICISTS discovered it as though they were finding a hidden treasure: from here one can see better than anywhere in the world all the mysteries of the sky, as though the island had a natural observatory that enabled one to observe the future via the sky’s DNA.
They are on the Roque de los Muchachos, those observatories which are now the emblem of an island which until recently preferred to look down to the ground, to its national symbol, the Caldera de Taburiente, than up to the sky. It is a triangular island, very beautiful, born to be green and beautiful, a contrast between the lava which forms it and the trees which have made it the greenest island of the archipelago.
La Isla Verde. La Isla Bonita. This is what the people who have come here have called it, and this is what the inhabitants of Las Palmas call it themselves. Both groups have a contagious devotion for the island, so that when one comes to the island one is already in the presence of its adjectives. Verde. Bonita.
Green and beautiful. Here one finds an exception to what the Catalan urban planner said, eating his parrotfish in Puertito de la Cruz: here the greenery is tectonic and green at the same time: everything is green, but everything is rock as well; the island is green, and the Caldera is green, intensely green, and the lava extensions to the island, thrown out by successive explosions, are green as well.
When he came here, Aldecoa wrote, more than fifty years ago, that ‘the island is in the shape of a heart. The island has a heart as well; a heart of fire, a volcano heart. There is a crucible under the surface of La Palma, and Saint Michael, the angel who defeated the creatures of fire, protects La Palma from its own flaming heart.’
Island of legends and distances: its roads are winding, the curves transform a short journey into a long one, and the way in which the landscape is structured has given the island huge patience. It is a symbol cut out of the rock with a pick, an intricate path on which the valleys are the final surprise of a tortuous journey through curves and impossible cultivated land; the island is patient, but its landscape has led its patience to be almost infinite. The beauty of its landscape has to be walked over, or cultivated with extremely patient labour, because it is full of cliffs and slopes; La Caldera, which is so easy to descend, becomes a sheer trench when time comes to climb it, just as the ancient inhabitants of the island crossed the cliffs from side to side: with strong sticks or staffs.
It is the green island, and it is also the island where one can smell the sea the best. It is the island of the Caldera de Taburiente, but it is also the island of the Aridane valley, the island of the abrupt and the mysterious, the island that is closest to the sky, but also the island that stretches out the most before the sea. La Palma is so close to the sky that one has the impression that it would take just a little shove to force it into the sky; but the sea is so close and so powerful that one might also imagine that the island is afloat: looking at the sky but subject to the sea.
There is an important collection of Flemish art on the island, which began with the immigrants who came here from Flanders in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in order to help build the ingenious sugar plants of La Palma. They brought sculptures with them, and paintings, and panels which were representative of Flemish art, of the end of the Gothic period and of the Renaissance, coming from the workshops in Brussels, Antwerp, Bruges and Ghent. This influence transformed La Palma into an island with a great deal of cultural ambition and the best artistic patrimony in the whole archipelago.
The first trip I made to La Palma, in 1968, was to meet and interview an old cigar-maker, Don Pedro Capote. Back in those days, La Palma had a significant tobacco industry. Silk was another industry in which it took pride. Both of these activities have faded significantly, and now all that La Palma has are relics of the splendour which, fifty years ago, held it almost at a level, in the case of its tobacco industry, with the island of Cuba, which it resembles so much in so many other ways.
This time I went to La Palma in search of its sounds, its tastes and its hidden routes. I planned the journey the night I met a man, Mauro Fernández, who invited us to a legendary house, right in the centre of the island; the table was laid with the products of island, which his wife Malula had put out with great care, and certain people had gathered there to celebrate some kind of May festival: there are festivals almost every day in the Islands, but especially during May.
Mauro arrived late; when he got home he told us that he had been walking for five hours, in his high boots and his hat and his satchel, along paths which he had not walked until that point, although he knew almost all the paths on the island.
And so it was there that I thought he would be a good companion for my journey, and I suggested it to him a few months later, when I had already visited the part of the island that everyone visits: the Roque de los Muchachos observatories which have placed La Palma at the forefront of our investigations of the sky. Mauro is a man of the earth, and he came to us that night from the earth, and when he met me at the La Palma airport some little while later, he brought me back to the earth.
There is something metaphorical about one’s arrival in La Palma, if you come by air, because the airport displays a kind of summary of the island’s variety: greenhouses, palm trees, the sea. This is the first vision of La Palma, the one that fills you with the island; you have the sea in front of you, high and clear, carrying boatfuls of passengers to and from the island. Malula and Mauro like showing people the islands, they told us as we drove through Garafía; there is an old man with a hat (his ‘puppy’, as they call it) and his cigar, smoking it with such enjoyment that one might think he was about to disappear in a cloud of smoke. Mauro has retired now, but he used to work for Unelco, the Islands’ electric company, which allowed him to get to know the paths all across this island. La Palma, the island of light, was the first of the Canaries to have electricity, which came to the island in 1893. After Barcelona and Madrid, Santa Cruz de La Palma was the third Spanish city to get electric light. And La Palma was also a cultural centre, open to the influence of the Encyclopédie, and was also the place where the Islands’ first newspaper, the Diario de Avisos, came into being. It is still published to this day.
SANTA CRUZ DE LA PALMA IS A MAGNIFICENT ARTISTIC ACHIEVEMENT IN and of itself, a historic place. It is a calm city, surprising both in its beauty and in its cleanliness, as though the city wanted to reveal its soul or its history in the calm and ancient spectacle of its narrow cobbled streets; a city which is like a reflection of the past which still dwells within it.
The city was born in order to house the Christianity which the Catholic monarchs exported to the island during the period of lawlessness under Alonso Fernández de Lugo, in 1492, when he also got his hands on the island of Tenerife. Fernández de Lugo came to the island via Tazacorte; alliances and struggles preceded the conquest, and the island’s resistance ended in 1493 when it fell into the hands of the Catholics. This was when Santa Cruz de La Palma was founded, and it has always been and continues to be in the vanguard of the cosmopolitan life of the Islands.
The city of Santa Cruz de la Palma faces the east, as was habitual back then in the case of cities that faced the sea, and it was built, slowly, in a linear fashion after the model favoured by the Portuguese, who had a great influence on the urban and human development of the territory. In the Avenida Marítima, which is perhaps the most heavily exposed to the ocean of all the avenues in the Islands, there are still some houses which recall the abundant presence of the Portuguese. Old houses painted in an extremely evocative fashion, with balconies that are only to be seen in this particular spot, covered with shutters to protect them when the sea is too rough. These shutters used to protect the toilets of the houses as well; they were cleaned by the action of the sea when it was rough. Now the friends who accompany me on my island journey have pointed the shutters out to me as a spectacle in and of themselves, like a symbolic remnant of what man does in order to display his inventiveness.
The architectural record of the city is exceptional, one of the most important in the whole of the Islands. I have it noted down in my book that the city has been threatened on numerous occasions, and that it somehow survived the earthquake on 3 May 1632; it was also unaffected by the regular fires, especially that of 1770. It has avoided being ruined by speculation, and this is another miracle of nature, to some extent.
The history of Santa Cruz de la Palma can be divided into two eras. The first begins at the moment of the Catholic conquest and lasts until 1553, when the pirates of François Le Clerc, known as Pegleg, invaded the island. Then the island developed towards the south, and became an obligatory stopping point on the path to the Indies which Columbus had discovered, and here they set up the first Indies court, which was a key to the control and regulation of the traffic which paused in this formerly much-transited port.
The cultivation of sugar cane, especially in the works at Argual, Tazacorte and Los Sauces, brought in commerce with the Low Countries and increased the degree of cosmopolitanism which helps distinguish La Palma, and its capital above all, in the history of the Islands. This was the spot whence the malmsey wine was exported to Europe, the same malmsey wine that Shakespeare refers to so often in his works and which was so popular in the countries of northern Europe. The traffic was also cultural, in that extremely cultured people from Antwerp and other cities in the Netherlands came and settled on La Palma.
The ships that carried the sugar and the wine returned from Flanders with religious trappings, carpets, weapons, bells, paintings, panels, altarpieces and sculptures, which are now treasures that are kept in the capital and on the island. In the eighteenth century, the city which now sleeps in the sun of its history was the third most important port of the Spanish Empire, along with Seville and Antwerp. And that made the island extremely attractive to all kinds of pirate.
But the nineteenth century redeemed the island to some degree, and its capital above all, as one of the most advanced Spanish sites of learning. Here modernism and liberalism set down some roots; here the first printing press in the island was set up; the first newspaper was printed in 1863; electricity was installed. Some of the youth of the city went to study in Paris. Paris was from which came the news that electric light existed. One of the students who went to France, attracted by the idea of culture, came back from his journey telling anyone who would listen that if you pushed a button in the wall then the whole room would light up. This news was the initial impetus for La Palma to get electricity installed in advance of the other islands of the archipelago, and on 31 January 1893 Santa Cruz de la Palma was the first capital to install electric street lighting.
A little earlier, in 1881, the Cosmological Society was founded, with the intention of being the focus for cultural and scientific discussion on the island, and it was the seed of a great library. This quiet outburst was the result of this island, which already had a high regard for culture and science, making a wager on their behalf, a wager that has encouraged the appearance of great people, poets, actors, musicians and even shoemakers, like Manolo Blahnik, a great contemporary figure, well known all over the world. But it is the Calle Real, and its traditional spectacle of dwarves making jokes against Napoleon, its vast artistic heritage, the Descent of the Virgin … it is these cultural remnants which are some of the elements that make this island into much more than a landscape and a history. They called it La Isla Bonita, but it would be equally just to call it La Isla Misterio, the Mystery-Island, and to uncover this mystery it is best to come and see it. And to come and see it with, for example, Malula and Mauro, my friends.
MAURO AND MALULA TELL ME THE STORIES OF LA PALMA AS WE WALK through villages which still look the same and are as peaceful as they were when electricity first came to the island: Los Sauces, El Paso, Breña Alta, Garafía, all of them places connected to agriculture and tobacco. Mauro and Malula, and the jeep in which we travel, know all of these sheer curves, all these curves which reveal at every turn a new banana plantation. Up here, at almost 8,000 feet, they point out the Roque de los Muchachos, with its spectacular installations in which a number of European countries have set up their observatories. ‘This is the best sky in the world,’ they say to me, but the worldly authorities which control the sky have chosen Chile to install what will be the best telescope in the world, and this has been seen on the island as the result of a failure of political will or an offence that the legendary patience of the Islands will have to deal with.
But we are at ground level; here it is the insects which annoy us, or the plants that damage the vine stock (there’s a plant called ‘cat’s tail’ which affects the vines); they tell us about them, pointing out the vines that festoon the path like hanging gardens. Presiding over the landscape are houses in the Portuguese style (three windows, three doors), which can be explained by the continued influence of the Portuguese on this and the other western islands of the archipelago. The first books that were brought to the island came from Portugal, they came in the sixteenth century and were written in Old Portuguese. There was a Portuguese man at that time, Gaspar Frutuoso, who discovered the island. He travelled over it step by step, ate the fruit of the prickly pear that they cultivated in Puntagorda; he hired a man to accompany him who said, when they reached Garafía: ‘I will not accompany you from Garafía to Barlovento because I do not know the roads.’ And this stretch of the journey, which Gaspar Frutuoso would travel in ten minutes nowadays, took him about a day.
Mauro pointed out the cliffs and the little rivers with enthusiasm, he pointed to the ravines and the woods, we were passing though the Cubo de la Galga, which is a beautiful forest in Barranco de la Galga. It is such an agricultural island that one would almost say that it has been fully planted. Fully; there is not a single nook or cranny on La Palma which does not contain the shadow of a tree, or a bush. The problem is that fifty per cent of what has been planted on the island is now abandoned. In the 1950s tobacco was grown everywhere, the island was similar to Cuba, a huge tobacco factory, but the blue mould came, a plague, and the tobacco was seriously attacked; now it is only at Las Breñas where they grow any tobacco.
I WAS IN LA PALMA ANOTHER TIME, ROUND ABOUT 1974, AND THEY TOOK me to San Andrés y Sauces, which is two worlds in one; what I remember of this trip is the huge rocky cliff, next to a double plaza, by an old yet still preserved church. I was back here once again quite recently listening to South American singing, intoning Chavela Vargas’s broken rancheras, and eating ropa vieja. Mauro and Malula have taken us back to this same spot; they serve gofio, they give us wine and cheese; we are on La Palma: outside they are celebrating weddings or baptisms, it is September, but it could be any of the festival days in the whole year; there would be the same festive atmosphere, you would hear the same songs, we would be enjoying the same weather. The island is blue, it is not at all surprising that the sky here should be so sought-after.
This place has something about it of a fifteenth-century Italian town, like much of the rest of the island; the same ability to understand that it is by reading that one achieves progress, the same sense that the island is public property that has to be left in good condition for those who will come after. The jingoistic love which the inhabitants of La Palma have means that they are proud of their achievements (this was where the first shipyards were built; this was where the first newspapers were established …) and also proud of having one of the best-preserved landscapes of all the islands, including the larger ones. Construction here has been permitted only to a very small degree; you could take a photograph today on La Palma, just as you could on El Hierro or La Gomera, and the image would look very similar to what it would have looked like seventy years ago to Ignacio Aldecoa’s travelling companions.
AND SO WE EAT, CHEESE, GOFIO, PARROTFISH, SOLE … MAURO REMEMBERS a few lines of poetry and recites them: ‘In El Cubo de la Galga | under a flowering almond tree | my mother gave my father | love’s first kiss …’ They serve us escaldón, gofio in stock, like that we had in Puertito de la Cruz. They add the raw onion I want to this dish, the guayonge onion, the blue onion which seems both an onion and a colour out of the earth. We go over our plans: on this island you have to go to La Caldera, and you have to go to see the volcanoes, they say. We are in the centre of the island now. The volcano path will take us to the tip of the island, to Fuencaliente. They do not know this, but at the moment that they say the name, Fuencaliente, I am seeing in my mind a spectacular sunset, similar to the sunset I saw from the window of the aeroplane as I came in to Tenerife. They are telling me that it is there, thanks to the volcanoes, that the island has grown over the last two million years; at some point during this period the Benahoarites, the first settlers, came to the island, and ‘then we came’, Mauro says, with the irony that is so typical of La Palma. La Caldera was over 11,000 feet tall, taller than Mount Teide, but ‘two million years ago it collapsed and fell into what is now the Aridane valley’.
Mauro is still holding back a few surprises, in order to show to the traveller some of the places that only he visits. The place where he is taking us is called Rio Muerto, it is a cove that is almost secret, approached by sheer cliffs, and it is on the part of the coast called the Mazo, under the Colada del Volcán Martín, which poured out its lava in 1660; here there are old houses, beehives, ovens; it is clear that man has stepped onto this land, but it is also clear that man comes very rarely to this place where the volcano provides shelter, where we are now in its shadow … Mauro and his hill-walking friends travel through these godforsaken places, from La Breña to La Cumbre, five hours walking, five men, under the laurisilva, crossing on paths which are sown with plum trees and through gardens which feed houses that have been here for four hundred years. The church of San Andrés, which they point out to me, has been here since 1515.
The places where we travel are serious spots, they are like Italian landscapes of the fifteenth century, as though the hand of history which makes such landscapes had stopped here; the colours are restrained, almost old; I note in my book that ‘from time to time there are dull bursts of a Mexican yellow’.
We are walking along the spine of the island, we are travelling to San Andrés and to Las Breñas, ‘this is a fierce tongue of land bathed in a clean sea’, my notes say … We pass through Hoyo de Mazo, a little winery, a few vines, the Molino de Mazo, the Mazo mill, ‘which is like a little sigh of a mill’. In the distance one can see La Gomera, we are standing right next to a solitary palm and some fig trees, on an earthen path, near Manchas Blancas. From here you can see the crater of a volcano, Martín, next to the part of the coast that they call Tigalate Hondo. The goats are ranging free, and so are the little black pigs. ‘I have been walking round here for forty years,’ Mauro says. We are down now, in Río Muerto, where there are slabs of stones like pillows, sea stones that must have been here for millions of years. This was where Martín erupted in 1646 and the island grew larger thanks to an immense flow of lava which now coexists with the other parts of nature here in this so aptly named Río Muerto, Dead River.
I speak to Mauro:
‘It is impossible to know the whole island.’
‘You’ll never know it all. It is different in winter and in summer, as well.’
The Islands are like that, never the same, never identical; their horizon, as the painter Pedro González put it, marks them out, but the horizon is never the same, it is a turning point, the centre of a wheel. Here, in Río Muerto, I can sense the prehistoric sound which all lonely places retain. I listen to the sea as it forms pools, as though it were an ocean in waiting, dead, or pretending to be dead. In the distance one can see the tip of the island, the lighthouse at Fuencaliente. It was there that I saw the sunset which is still the most beautiful sunset I have seen in the Islands, along with the one that I saw in the aeroplane over the sea, coming into Tenerife.
On the way to Fuencaliente, Mauro points out El Pino del Alivio, which is where in the twentieth century the animals, the mules and donkeys and mares who pulled carriages, would take a pause and rest. A decade later, Mauro tells me in his most serious voice, they buried the victims of the Civil War.
Mauro likes telling us the legend (which is based on fact) of the Fuentesanta, a spring which was buried by two volcanoes and which has been the object of unstinting searches (because its medicinal waters are much sought-after) since the eighteenth century. These searches were always accompanied by failure until 2005, when the spring reappeared. The history of this search is in itself a novel on the island’s desire to bury the failures of its past; when we travel across the island they have rediscovered it and are acting as though they had found the Holy Grail. ‘It is the best water in Europe.’
WE HAVE COME DOWN INTO THE ARIDANE VALLEY; WE HAVE BEEN UNDER the shade of the Indian laurels, we have attended to a small errand to do with the wealth of the country (there are seventeen banks for two thousand inhabitants), we have looked at the Flemish art in the churches and museums, we have been to the glassblowers’ works, and we have visited El Time.
El Time is wonderful, a valley out of paradise where the one unnecessary thing is the plastic which the farmers use to make bananas ripen more quickly. Before climbing up in order to see this natural monument ruined by plastic, we have paused for a moment in the hermitage of the Agony of our Lord. Canary Island pine, banana trees, cliff. Inside the hermitage an extremely sad man cries and constantly crosses himself. El Time is nearly 2,000 feet above sea level; there used to be pools here, which was why it was called the Valle de los Espejos, Mirror Valley. Now there are no longer any pools, but only this insistent plastic. Mauro says that ‘the banana is the landscape’. But agricultural greed has damaged the landscape … As I look at this most beautiful place I can’t get out of my mind the image of the man weeping in front of the picture of the Agony.
An island that looks up into the sky, but above all an agricultural island. Before taking us to La Caldera, which is like the promised land of La Palma, Maura and Malula take us along the path of the fig trees, the path of the Japanese medlars, the path of the plums … On some of these paths one can hear the sound of a cock crowing, and we see large numbers of drago trees; the houses crowd up to the edge of the cliff as though they were daring each other to do dangerous balancing acts. At one point I calculate how far Mauro must have walked along these paths, and I come to the conclusion, counting on my fingers, that he has walked 7,181 miles in fifty years. He laughs. ‘Probably,’ he says.
We have come through Santo Domingo, where next to a sixteenth-century hermitage they feed us with pork at tables covered with red, white and blue check tablecloths, and once again it is as though we are in an old Italian trattoria where they serve old fashioned Canary Island food, simple and well-seasoned, tasty and straightforward. Then we walk past French cliff, Galician cliff and the cliff of Mankind … I ask Mauro a question:
‘Of all the places you have walked through, which is the one where you would most like to live?’
He replies immediately, without pausing for a moment.
‘La Caldera. There are always places in La Caldera that you have never seen before. The more I walk the more there is still left for me to walk in La Caldera.’
And here we are; he has taken us very early in the morning to La Caldera. There are athletes, who are training here for elite competitions. La Caldera is a prehistoric dip in the ground filled with majestic trees, a hole majestic in itself which makes you feel like some wretched little shrub among all the green shades of this green place. It is true, with every minute that passes, La Caldera de Taburiente is a new space, a place you must discover once again. You hear the silence. Mauro is right: a journey like the one we have taken all over the island, crossing the paths that are like the palm of someone’s hand, all this is only a moment of preparation for going down to La Caldera. I wanted to cross it, as he did, by secret paths on which the foot of man barely fits, and I have not dared do it. I am not ready to be like Mauro, but I admire his light feet; he is seventy years old at least, and he walks as though he had just come into the world. Here inland one breathes a special air; silence is a food of the air.
THEN MAURO TAKES US TO SANTA CRUZ DE LA PALMA AND WALKS US UP the Calle Real, which is like the hand of the eighteenth century pointing to the twenty-first century and indicating the relics that existed back then. At one point Mauro stops and points out a plaque to me: ‘Here they established the first public non-religious school of the island. 1794 to 1994. Ayntamiento de Santa Cruz de la Palmas.’ In 1774, Mauro tells me, they also brought the first democratic government to Spain. We walked, as we had when we walked on La Caldera, in order to find an island which connects nature with cultural and scientific progress, a privileged site which now looks at the land and the soil with the pride of having been a pioneer in many things. In its peacefulness it is as though it had always been there, waiting, but always for a time that was yet to come, like Mauro and his paths.
Then we went to eat fried squid facing the sea, with Pilar Rey and Antonio Abdo, both of them poets, and Mauro and Malula. Talking about the French Revolution, which came here via the sea, and about the relationship of the Islands with the masonic lodges in Cuba, and about the great number of places from which the Islands’ inhabitants came (Ireland, Andalusia, Extremadura, Galicia, Portugal), and about the tradition of the Dwarves, originally figures created to insult Napoleon, which are now brought out once every five years, when the Virgin of the Snows is brought down to the city, and about the 1885 creation of the Cosmology, one of the entities which connects La Palma to the culture of the rest of the world, and about the shipyards, and about the splendour of the nineteenth century …
But above all we speak about the landscape. La Palma is its landscape, here it is as though landscape were organising your life: cliffs and pine trees and green valleys, the architectural marvel that is La Caldera, which seems the mould from which Mount Teide was cast. From here, out of this silence, the sky appears to be a roof. You hear the cawing of the rooks. In the midst of the light which the pine trees allow to pass through them you see the rock, the greenery, the smooth cliff, the innumerable paths, from a hillock you see an arch, a fantastic amphitheatre filled with sunlight …
Mauro points out a stone monolith. He says that if the monolith falls then the island will collapse.
I believe him, because on La Palma everything is true.
And truth comes from the sky, just as the island did.