Meloneras; Friday, 07 February, 2025

I had a relatively early start as the full day tour I had booked onto was picking me up at 08:30, so after a quick breakfast I headed out of the hotel 10 minutes early to find the bus already waiting. Thankfully I wasn’t the only guest being picked up at the hotel and the other couple didn’t arrive until 5 minutes before our scheduled pickup time, so I didn’t have to feel like I’d kept the small number of people on the bus waiting!

As with all these types of tours the first hour was spent meandering around the streets of Maspalomas and Playa del Inglés picking up more guests until we had an almost full bus and moved onto the tour itself, starting by heading up into the interior of the island and the small settlement of Guayadeque where we visited one of the many cave houses that are still lived in.

From there we set off to drive over to the town of El Goro, but along the way we had to stop for quite a time as on a narrow mountain road a car decided it could try squeezing past the bus and failed. In the ensuing attempt to back up the hill to a passing place the car driver managed to pretty much burn their clutch out, so had to be dragged back up the hill by some of the long line of other cars that were now waiting behind them.

It meant that our arrival to the Aloe Vera factory was delayed and they had to cut short the sales pitch about all the marvellous things the plant does, but it was still interesting to be shown what the inside of the leaves looks like as they cut them open.

From El Goro and the Aloe Vera factory we zipped round the island on the motorway to head up to the north and the small town of Firgas, capital of the smallest municipality on the island of the same name. We had a quick look around town, taking in the fountain which has the coats of arms of all the municipalities on the island, as well as the decorated street which has models of each of the seven main islands along with ceramic tile pictures of emblematic scenes from each island along with it’s coat of arms.

After leaving Firgas we had a steep drive up into the mountains and stopped off in Zamore for a very pleasant lunch in a restaurant overlooking a deep ravine from where it was possible to look all the way down to the north coast and the capital Las Palmas. Lunch completed we continued the drive up into the mountains, passing the Roque Nublo one of the symbols of the island, before crossing through the edge of the caldera of the volcano that originally formed the island and descending down into what was once the boiling heart of the volcano.

After stopping off at a view point about a third of the way down, from where you can clearly make out the curved walls of what would once have been the inside of the volcano, we continued our journey south through the centre of the island stopping off at the small village of Fataga. The village has managed to retain many of it’s Canarian styled buildings and is an example of how many of the small villages of the island would have looked like in the past.

Fataga was our last stop of the tour and from there we drove south, along more winding and steep mountain roads, back to the top of the resort areas where we dropped off the very earliest boarders for their own shuttle bus back to their hotels and then promptly drove straight to my hotel – which was a bonus as I was expecting the full hour hotel tour process in reveres again.

It meant that I was back at the hotel with just enough time to grab my swimming trunks and head to the pool for a quick dip before heading out of the resort and down to the beach to take in the sunset and have a little paddle in the much colder than the swimming pool Atlantic ocean.

I headed back to my room to shower and freshen up and quite a bit later than the previous evening headed down for dinner before stopping for a night cap and then to bed.