Santa Cruz de La Palma; Friday, 24 February, 2023

I had to be up relatively early to catch the bus on into the capital Santa Cruz de La Palma as I was due to join a 5 hours tour in the late morning there, rather than having a hotel pickup, so I had a quick breakfast and made sure I was at the bus stop at the same time as the bus was due to depart from the Airport given there are no actual timetables, just the start times from Santa Cruz and the Airport. Even with its meandering route through Los Cancajos the bus took less than 10 minutes to reach the Guagua station in Santa Cruz, where everyone was kicked off as preparations for the carnival the following week meant the city centre roads were closed and the bus wasn’t going any further – which turned out to be useful to know as it meant I only had 5, rather than 15 minutes, after the advertised departure time from Santa Cruz to make the bus in Los Cancajos!

I had a bit of a wander around the centre of Santa Cruz as I headed down to where I was supposed to meet the bus, getting there about 20 minutes before the departure time. We’d been told in the booking to be at the bus stop 10 minutes before the departure time and right on queue the coach turned up direct from the harbour where it had picked up guests from the ferry from Tenerife. It turns out that this was a scheduled 30 minute comfort and coffee stop for those guests, so I could quite easily have caught a later bus from Los Cancajos and still made the tour, as we ended up standing around for quite some time.

Eventually the tour set off and for the first part we drove along the main seafront road in Santa Cruz, taking the in pleasant seafront buildings and the castle before turning inland and starting to climb up out of the city centre. About 15 minutes later and 300m higher up we were on the rim of a long since extinct volcano looking right back down into the centre of Santa Cruz from the Mirador de La Concepción. There was a good 10 minute stop here to take in the views from the edge of the partially collapsed volcano, including down into it’s caldera where an entire suburb of Santa Cruz has recently been built.

From the viewpoint we continued our journey west across the island, climbing up into the rainforest and mountains that form the spine of La Palma, before diving through the rock in a 1km long tunnel and emerging out on the western side of the island, close to the site of the 2021 volcanic eruption that had put La Palma on the news. And, this was in fact the site of our next stop, just on the edge of the exclusion zone that’s still in place.

The eruptions lasted for 85 days starting on the 19th September 2021 and with them damaged vast swathes of the Western side of the island, destroying thousands of buildings, banana plantations and leaving a lava flow that in places towers like a new cliff over the landscape. The coach stopped a little short of the exclusion zone and we walked the last couple of hundred meters to the edge of the lava flow, about a kilometre below the still smoking volcano – the stain of sulphur around it’s rim clearly visible from below.

The lava flow runs straight down from the mountains to the sea, cutting through everything and it was a weird sight to see what would previously have been a mundane road just suddenly stopped by a 20m high wall of rock. The flow continues as a solid mark down the landscape, to one side banana plantations, grass and houses, to the other just this solid black wall of rock on top on the landscape.

From the view point in the exclusion zone we hopped back on the bus and continued the journey down the hill to the nearby town of La Laguna where some of the lava flows eventually stopped, but not before causing massive damage to the town. One flow came to a halt just a few feet from the towns church.

From La Laguna we headed back onto the coach and continued our journey west to the town of Puerto de Tazacorte, located at the bottom of a steep gorge, formed when the side of the massive volcano that first formed the island collapsed into the sea. The approach down into the town, zig zagging our way down the steep walls of the gorge was pretty spectacular as are the views back up the gorge from the bottom. Puerto de Tazacorte was also the site of our lunch, so we stopped here for a good 90 minutes to have lunch and then look around.

Leaving Puerto de Tazacorte we stopped off at one more view point in Tajuya, 3Km from the volcano and which, at the height of the eruptions had been the closest you could get to the volcano – from an elevated position looking head on you are staring almost directly into the centre of the crater.

We headed back towards Santa Cruz, through the lower and almost 3km long tunnel through the rock of the island, dropping off the passengers for the boat back to Tenerife before being dropped off just in front of the bus back to Los Cancajos. I was back in the hotel in time for a quick swim before the pool closed and then dinner.