El Hierro: Incredible Hiking Trails At The End Of The World

Lobito would show me the way. The fudge-coloured mutt with a question mark tail had been my companion, on and off, for much of my day’s hike. He first padded up to me out on the Nisdafe plateau while, to a backdrop of exploded volcano craters, I sat munching my midday sandwich of smoky morcilla sausage. I later learned his name from a shepherdess who yelled at him to keep away from her sheep-dog bitch. Lobito (which means ‘little wolf’) was, she divulged to me in Spanish, hands on hips, “…a Don Juan… forever on amorous adventures, if you understand me. Just like my nephew in Mocanal, his owner.”

I next met Lobito when he emerged from the undergrowth while I was looking for the trail through pine woods to Mocanal village, just west of the island’s capital’ Valverde. Calculating that he must be making his gratified way home, I followed the question mark down a lava-paved mule track. Sure enough Libido (as I could not help re-christening him) showed me the way. In truth, orientation on the island of El Hierro is fairly simple. One thing that had lured me to the smallest, furthest-south, furthest-west, often-forgotten and least-visited of the seven Canaries, was the Red de Senderos – a new network of themed hiking trails. These have been waymarked and well-mapped over the past couple of years by local tourism authorities.

El Hierro has no beaches (unless you count a couple of stony black crescents), no resorts or hotels with more than a handful of rooms, negligible nightlife and a general dearth of other mainstream holiday enticements, so the idea is to attract low-volume niche markets such as walkers and nature lovers. The fact that the island is not particularly easy to reach is put forward as a plus point. There are two ways of getting here: a three-hour ferry ride from Tenerife’s lager-and-chips-infested Los Cristianos; or a propeller-plane hop from Tenerife North airport near Santa Cruz (an hour by bus from the larger Tenerife South, where international flights arrive). I went for the latter option, finding even before we landed that the island packs a dramatic punch.

Virgin territory – It was lava at first sight. Through my plane window the lonely chunk of serrated grey, draped with a ragged green shawl, appeared adrift in the white-capped Atlantic Ocean. Smaller than the Isle of Wight with a population of just II,000 , El Hierro soars to a volcanic cone higher than Ben Nevis. In the days when the world was flat, this was the westernmost speck you could sail to without spilling over the edge. Columbus weighed anchor from here before discovering America, and as long ago as AD150 Greek sage Ptolemy declared it the cartographic prime meridian. Amazingly, it remained so until 1884 when, at a convention in Washington, Greenwich grabbed the honour of being zero degrees longitude.

From the toy-sized airport next to the north-eastern coastline, I took a taxi up to Valverde, a one-horse town of white houses tumbling down a hillside like builders’ rubble. There are no traffic lights, and few buildings more than two stories high, but I found a ‘fashion boutique’ claiming to be Tor men and women, boys and girls’; a barber (speciality: haircuts!’); and last but not least a mini-market selling crumbly queso herreno cheese and the morcilla blood sausage that was to sustain me on my rambles.

El Hierro’s hiking trails overlap and intersect, not really lending themselves to a single round-the-island itinerary. So, although I moved between a trio of small hotels, I found that the way to make the most of my week was to plot a daily route dipping in and out of more than one path. To this end, I called taxis to drop or pick me up and soon made friends with always-reliable Carlos Carreras, a great-grandfather and proud owner of the canary-yellow Mercedes 280SE that he bought in 1974 and now has a million kilometres on the clock.

“Walking? When I was young you went on foot if you were too poor for a donkey,” Carlos mused wryly. From Valverde I followed a stretch of the Camino de la Virgen, guided by bold red lettering on wooden guideposts as I climbed through patches of prickly pear and fig orchards, up to the crater-pocked Nisdafe plateau. Birds of prey – probably Canarian buzzards – wheeled overhead while I snaked through the bleak tracery of crumbling stone walls protecting abandoned, stony plots. Typically, these were left behind by the thousands of Herrenos forced by famine to seek their fortunes in Cuba during the early years of the 20th century. In later decades, thousands more left for oil-rich Venezuela. While the waymarking of this trail is recent, the human tracks it follows are much older.  An El Hierro legend tells of a ship bound for the New World in 1546, mysteriously becalmed with the sailors forced ashore to beg for food. In gratitude they presented their hosts with a statue of the Virgin Mary, whereupon up whipped the wind and off they scooted.

Awestruck by the Virgin’s power, the islanders built her the La Dehesa mountaintop chapel on the western side of the island, where the statue is still venerated. Once every four years she is paraded the length of the island by thousands of penitents – many of them emigrants returning to their ancestral home for an event. Apparently singing, dancing and drinking form part of the penance. The next of these bajadas de la virgen pilgrimages is not until 2017, so for me this trail was more wilderness walk than hair-shirted knees up. I puffed up to 1,501m Malpaso, El Hierros’s highest point, among a string of rival crests and crater rims. From here an expansive view unfurled across the wind-harassed sea to the neighbouring volcano-tip islands of La Palma and La Gomera.

Around of Golfo – The scenic drama ratcheted up further when I reached the cliffs of El Risco, which fall not to the sea but to El Golfo, the flat, green, lowland semi-circle that now occupies El Hierro’s north-west shoulder and looks as if it has been pawed out of the mountain. Only when I stood on the lip could I begin to imagine the cataclysmic collapse of the crater some 50,000 years ago (the twinkling of an eye in geological time) when a third of the island crashed into the Atlantic. The resulting tsunami, perhaps loom high, would have pounded the eastern seaboards of North and South America.

Pineapples, bananas, vines and almonds thrive on the El Golfo floor where most of El Hierro’s population live – along with the critically endangered El Hierro giant lizard. These reptiles can grow to more than a metre long and had been thought extinct when in 1974 a German naturalist discovered a surviving colony living in the crater wall. However, the only ones I came across were at the Lagartario, in the village of Guinea, where they are bred in a greenhouse, for release. Something that was dawning on me by degrees was how Latin American – as opposed to Spanish – El Hierro feels. Partly, this is the influence of returned emigrants: for instance, the minibuses connecting villages are known here as guaguas (pronounced ‘wah-wahs’) as they are in Caracas; and arroz a la cubana (rice with fried eggs and tomato sauce) is ubiquitous on menus. But I was also discovering that El Hierro’s remoteness protects some traditional Canarian ways that have been lost or diluted elsewhere in the tourist-swamped archipelago.

The El Golfo village of Sabinosa, where I spent an evening, could be in colonial Colombia with its courtyards and balconied houses compressed into a cliff. I was a guest at Senora Noli Casahas’ Casa de Comida where she offers (by prior arrangement only, this is her home not a restaurant) traditional Herreho hospitality. With three others I sat around her front room table scoffing gofio, the local staple of mushy maize meal with vegetables, and a jug of rough justice in the form of local Baboso Negro red wine.

Our hostess told us: “We Canarians are settlers, same as our cousins who went further across the Atlantic to America after leaving ‘La Peninsula’.” The latter term is a mildly derogatory reference to mainland Spain, which I have also heard used in South America. Still, human habitation here goes back centuries before the Europeans, who first settled on El Hierro in the 15th century. This is evidenced by petroglyphs engraved by the Bimbaches (the Canaries’ original inhabitants) on rocks above the lava-scaped pools of La Caleta, near the airport. Archaeologists have failed to decipher their meaning, or even agree on when the Bimbaches arrived and where they came from. However, along with their rock art, scraps of mythology have survived the familiar story of a people wiped out by violence, disease and sale into slavery.

One of these myths surrounds a sacred 15m-tall Garoe tree, worshipped by the Bimbaches on account of its ability to distil water on its leaves. In fact, the phenomenon of water condensing on trees and plants as mist disperses is not all that rare but, on an island where people have always had to struggle for water, the tree has become an emblem. The spot near San Andres, to the island’s north, where the tree (not the original obviously, but who cares) shades a cool, clear pool still felt touched by magic.

Boiling point – I stopped by the Garoe tree to eat my sandwich, on a day when I wove in and out of another themed hiking trail, the Ruta del Agua. I had traced this ‘water route’ along culverts and trenches contouring around mountains as they channel streams to otherwise waterless fincas (farmsteads). Herrenos, I was learning, still fight a perennial battle with rain that disappears into the porous, volcanic rock. This is a consequence of being the baby of the Canaries in age as well as size, having erupted from the ocean floor a mere million years ago. The other Canaries are between 12 and 20 times older.  I felt neither a nimble nor a shake during my week there, but El Hierro is still prone to a spot of volcanic and seismic activity.

The most recent was between September and November 2011 when a successions of tremors was followed by a fissure cracking open on the seabed oft’ the southern tip. The Atlantic’s surface fizzed and the fishing port of La Restinga was evacuated. “Fish were leaping out of the sea ready cooked,” joked (I think!) Paolo Cossovel, a Restinga resident who was one of my fellow diners in Sabinosa. On this occasion the planet decided against cataclysm, and serenity was restored by Christmas. Nevertheless, a final day’s hike across the south-west of the island ended with a lesson in just how restless the world is out at its edge.

Starting with the knee-straining ascent of a transhumance path – an old track used for driving livestock up to summer pastures – I reached the uplands of El Sabinar. These wilds may provide good grazing, but so exposed are they that the only trees to thrive are sabinas, the resilient and adaptable wild junipers bent double by prevailing westerlies. The wind was more accommodating with me, stilling to barely a breath, but something eerie remained about these natural sculptures with twisted silver trunks and branches hairy with lichen. They looked like mythological figures bowing to wash their tresses.

The landscape changed dramatically again as I dropped to the badlands of La Dehesa, the violent scene of the island’s most recent major eruption, in 1793.1 felt like an ant on the crumpled flank of an elephant as I crunched over twisted black rock and imagined the colossal tongue of surging magma. Reaching the sea, it solidified into bizarre black arches, pillars, natural bridges and outcrops like cathedral spires or hooked noses. These rock stars were to provide the main act in my final evening’s entertainment. With a local brandy in hand and by the light of a half moon, I sat on the terrace of the Pozo de la Salud hotel tuning in to the pounding beat of breakers. I watched surf turn to smoke as waves battered the otherworldly shapes they have been sculpting for two centuries. The forgotten island at the edge of the world does, I decided, do nightlife after all.