The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Which Canary island is right for you?
Helen Ochyra outlines the competing attractions available on this alluring archipelago
Everything about the sun-soaked Canary Islands, which were added to the UK’s travel corridor list in late October, always seems to feel bigger and brighter. I’ve paid the Spanish islands a visit at least once a year since I was a teenager, and the enormity of the place always strikes me, whether that is while gazing up at the pineapple-top foliage of the palm trees around the hotel pool, gawping at the humandwarfing size of the rainforest’s evergreen ferns, or running, grinning, down the dunes, my heels spraying golden sand in my wake.
I’ve risen before dawn to climb Mount Teide at Tenerife’s volcanic heart, and watched the sky turn candyfloss pink and then brightest cerulean at the start of yet another sunny winter’s day. I’ve taken off above pounding waves on a kitesurfing lesson, snorkelled with vast shoals of shiny, darting fish, and romped across jet-black lava fields and through endless pine forests.
Yes, there are brash resorts, but these are confined to a couple of strips of overdeveloped land, making them easy to avoid in favour of an empty sandy beach or one of the islands few non- Canarios have even heard of. Because that’s the other thing about the Canaries: they are plural. This is an archipelago of eight, each island with its own unique landscape.
In the west, lushness prevails, with subtropical rainforests filling volcanic calderas and topping plunging cliffs. Further east, closer to Africa, a drier, flatter lavascape sees sand blown in
JUMP RIGHT
IN from the Sahara, and exposed volcanic cones that resemble neat piles of ginger, cinnamon and cumin. The Atlantic surrounds you wherever you go.
The travel corridor means there’s no need to quarantine on return to the UK, although on entry it will be necessary to provide evidence of a negative Covid-19 test taken within the previous 72 hours. Visitors also need to download the local Radar Covid app.
In the general scheme of things, these are not onerous requirements, and with December temperatures known to top 21 degrees, the Canaries are a great option for winter warmth.
But which island is the the right one for you? Here are a few pointers... .
BEST FOR FAMILY FUN
Tenerife
Tenerife is the best-known Canary for a reason, dwarfing its neighbours with its sky-piercing volcano and glitzy attractions. Towering Teide volcano is a 12,198ft active peak that is snow-capped in winter. The summit is best reached via cable car (€27/£24 return) and you won’t forget the eye-popping Atlantic views – or the nostril- tingling sulphur plumes – in a hurry.
Tenerife’s best family day out can be found at Loro Parque (loroparque. com), home to the world’s most diverse population of parrots, as well as penguins, gorillas and lions ( guided tours €100pp including lunch). There are also glorious sandy beaches for sandcastle-building and parent-burying along the Costa Adeje and at Playa de las Teresitas.
Stay: The hip Hard Rock Hotel Tenerife (0800 021 1256; telegraph. co.uk/tt-hard-rock-tenerife), with its family-friendly pools, kids clubs and rooftop bar, has rooms from £183 including breakfast.
The ferries that link the islands cross some of Europe’s best whalewatching waters
BEST FOR ISLAND HOPPING
La Gomera
The Canaries were made for island hopping, with ferries criss-crossing them. The easiest two to combine are Tenerife and La Gomera, linked by a 50-minute cruise across some of Europe’s best whale- watching waters ( from €17.20/£16 return; navieraarmas.com). From here you can spot bottlenose dolphins and pilot whales, before heading up through La Gomera’s lush valleys to the ancient laurel forest of Garajonay, with its abundant hiking trails, and the pretty beaches of Valle Gran Rey.
Don’t miss the boat trip out to Los Órganos, an incredible cliffside curtain of basalt columns (€40/£36; speedygomera.com).
Stay: Parador Conde de la Gomera (0034 913 742 500; telegraph.co.uk/ tt-parador-conde-de-la-gomera) offers clifftop rooms from €145/£132 per night. Enjoy the view out towards Tenerife and the sunset-facing pool.
BEST FOR FIRST-TIMERS
Gran Canaria
First visit? Compact Gran Canaria has a dash of everything: vast sand dunes, twisted volcanic rock formations, leafy forests and even a town set in a series of ancient caves.
The people of Artenara have been cave-dwellers for centuries – and many still are. The new museum (artenara.es) may just sell you on their ecoconscious lifestyle. Also found in the island’s central mountains is Tejeda, a charming hilltop village surrounded by walking routes, and the volcanic thumb of Roque Nublo, once a place of worship for the aboriginal Guanches.
The island’s south is sun-soaked and boasts Gran Canaria’s best beaches, including the shifting golden peaks of the Maspalomas dunes. You won’t have to walk far to shake off the crowds – or your clothes (it is nudist-friendly). Stay: The retro-chic Seaside Palm Beach (0034 928 721 032; telegraph. co.uk/tt-seaside-palm-beach) offers dune-view rooms and a pool surrounded by palms from £167, including breakfast. and lengthy sand beaches. A dirt road known as the North Track sees a steady stream of surfboard-topped camper vans and wetsuit-clad water babies seeking out the best of the waves between the towns of El Cotillo and Corralejo, both of which have numerous surf schools.
To the south, Fuerteventura seems to turn entirely to sand, promising endless powdery beaches stretching out into shallow turquoise waters. These are ideal conditions for windsurfing, or for scuba diving on Jandia reef. Here, you can chase trumpet fish, moray eels and groupers, and spot angel sharks and stingrays (guided dives from €46/£42; diveprofuerte.com).
Stay: Gran Hotel Bahía Real (0034 971 929 364; telegraph.co.uk/tt-gran-hotelatlantis-bahia-real), just outside Corralejo, has beach-view rooms and a chic ocean-front lounge bar. From €145/£132, including breakfast.
BEST FOR A STYLISH BREAK
Lanzarote
“Lanzagrotty” is no more – the chicest of the islands has shaken off its down-atheel reputation and emerged as the Canary of choice for the hipster crowd.
Island-born architect César Manrique is largely responsible for Lanzarote’s harmonious aesthetic, having designed many of the sugar-cube casas scattered across its ebony lavascape, as well as many of the public buildings.
Check out his Jameos del Agua, a volcanic tube turned café and concert venue, and the Jardín de Cactus, where the sculptural plants fill an ancient quarry (cactlanzarote.com). Lanzarote also produces the islands’ best wines from the small, friendly bodegas dotted around the interior. Bodega La Geria (lageria.com) and Bodegas Rubicón (bodegasrubicon.com) stand opposite each other, surrounded by vines and lava peaks. Both offer laidback tastings. Stay: Manrique-style rural retreat Finca Malvasia (0034 692 155 981; telegraph.co.uk/tt-finca-malvasia) has five chic self-catering apartments clustered around a small pool. From €128.40/£116.
BEST FOR END OF THE WORLD APPEAL
El Hierro
Before Columbus set sail westwards, El Hierro was the edge of the known world and the island retains an end-of-theroad feel to this day.
Stroll through the highland flower meadows and dense El Pinar pine forest, swim in the rock pools at La Maceta and feast on seafood at sleepy La Restinga – you will soon slip into island time.
Don’t head back before taking a hike among the wind-battered juniper trees at El Sabinar, bludgeoned by the powerful westerlies to form eerie bent-over shapes unlike anything you will have ever seen.
Stay: Hotel Puntagrande (0034 611
285 983; telegraph.co.uk/tt-hotelpuntagrande) is a teeny adults-only bolt hole surrounded by the Atlantic waves. From €300/£268 a night.
BEST FOR A DESERT
ISLAND ESCAPE
La Graciosa
With no cars, no flights and very few visitors, La Graciosa is the quietest Canary by far.
The only way in is by a 30-minute ferry ride (€26/£23 return; lineasromero.com). Cross the wave-rocked strait of El Río from Lanzarote, and your choice on arrival is simple: to bike or not to bike.
If you choose to hire two wheels, you will get out to remote Playa de las Conchas faster, but what’s the rush? Stick to your feet and take your time instead, circling the island on dusty beach-back trails, and clambering up Montaña Bermeja for the view down its paprika-coloured slopes to the white sands and turquoise waters beyond.
Stay: Casa Lola is an ex-fishermen’s house with seafront terrace and two bedrooms. Sleeps four from £99 (airbnb.co.uk).
Beyond the levee, cornfields dissolved into peagreen soup. Across the steamy land of bayous and vestigial forest, 10ft stems shot out leaves broad as flags; you expected a dinosaur to surge through the black gum, sending flumes into the blue. It did not surprise me to learn that there are three crops a year in the delta. Three crops a night would not have surprised me.
The Mississippi Delta in the northwest of the Magnolia State is regularly cited as the distilled essence of the Deep South. Properly the YazooMississippi Delta, its alluvial plain extends 200 miles from Vicksburg to Memphis, and they say the blues were born at the Tutwiler railhead. Every place has its writer, and the delta belongs to Eudora Welty. Here, she wrote, “most of the world seemed sky”.
Eudora was born in 1909 in Jackson, the state capital. The family’s antecedents were Swiss immigrants who cut a path through the Yazoo wilderness in the 1820s. A few years later the retreating Choctaw, loyal custodians of the delta, ceded their fertile territory to the new American government at the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek.
Welty remembered family trips in an Oakland touring car “with daddy simply aiming at the two-plank ferry gangway”. Another time, when she was 10, she and her father, an insurance man, sat on folding chairs at the railing of the open-air observation platform of a train. “We watched the sparks we made,” she reported, “fly behind us into the night… the sleeping countryside seemed itself to open a way through for our passage, then close again behind us.” The train – the traveller can still take it – appears in Welty’s best-known book, the 1946 novel Delta Wedding, which opens with nine-year-old Laura McRaven riding the Yellow Dog with her ticket in her hat.
Unlike many writers who return to their native soil remorselessly in their work, Welty never really left Jackson; she said she remained there “underfoot” her whole life. The delta remains a character as her work moves through the Second War. In her first collection of short stories, A Curtain of Green, she wrote about the antebellum homes on a bluff on the Natchez Trace, and in The Robber Bridegroom brought back the Natchez Indians whom the French annihilated in 1732: their ghosts still roam the Weltian Delta forests.
Welty recognised complexity and avoided the legend of the Old South and its platitudes. The reader will find no regard for the old order in the pages of Delta Wedding, and no judgment of its racial injustices either. She had an ear for the cadences of Mississippi speech, but what she wanted to write about was “the voiceless life of the human imagination”. One critic describes her genius for conjuring “the ingrown, post-historic, Coca-Cola-sodden South”.
She was an accomplished photographer as well as a writer (she won a
Pulitzer and the Presidential Medal of Freedom), shooting mainly with a Rolliflex. In the Depression she worked as a feature writer for the state branch of the fabled Works Progress Administration, Roosevelt’s enlightened job-creation scheme, travelling to each of the 82 county seats by public bus or at the wheel of her mother’s car, observing political rallies, revival meetings and a mule-powered cane-syrup mill. The poverty shocked her, and she said she “saw for the first time the nature of the place”. She immortalised the poor tomato farmers around Crystal Springs in Copiah County, and after spotting an open ironing board in a post office turned it into a comic soliloquy in the story “Why I Live at the P.O.”
On a road trip from New Orleans in search of Welty, I picked up Mississippi 1 at Mayesville and followed Old Glory north. The highway crept west across the lowlands, gun racks rattling on passing pickups. When the ground solidified, levee and road diverged around the flamingo legs of a water tower. Outside Greenville, a funeral cortege blocked the road, and a row of construction workers stood with hard hats covering their hearts. In the brakes, painted houses nestled among rowan oaks, netted windows black blanks. The air drooped.
As the light died outside Clarksdale I reached Shack Up Inn, a jumble of sharecroppers’ cabins walled with Mississippi cypress and roofed with tin, the original cotton gin now the bar. The sublime Shack Up remains open, ideal for social distancing as public spaces are closed, each shack is en suite with a kitchenette, and check-in is remote.
Tortured blues have temporarily fallen silent on the barn stage, but you will hear the thrum of Big Joe Williams’ nine-string guitar floating out of one shack or another. “The sun went down”, wrote Welty in Delta Wedding, “lopsided and wide as a rose on a stem in the west, and the west was a milk-white edge, like the foam of the sea.”