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.
