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.
