When I look up at the almost sheer, 2,500 foot, 750m, vegetation-naked cliffs of the escarpment of La Merica above the wild (and naked bathers’) beach of Playa del Inglés on La Gomera, I wonder how even lizards could have survived there.

This lizard making a dash for shade in the desert captures all the feels of the current heatwave.

With a fork in his tongue and corkscrew in his head, Erik Sprague loves being a lizard, he tells Ellie O’Byrne