Eruption of beauty on a volcanic gem

SOME things don’t change.

While asphalted highways soar and dive over La Gomera’s dramatic gorges and through its green cloud-forests, the owls are still abroad at night and a magnificent osprey daily quarters the sea just beyond the breakers on the main beach.

Development is still small, and good taste is its outstanding feature here. In unspoiled corners of the world, development has almost always brought ugliness. Not so, on this island in the sun. When we first came here 30 years ago, there was hardly a paved road on La Gomera while, on neighbouring Tenerife, new building was proceeding everywhere.

The results weren’t always pretty and are now regretted. Gomera was fortunate: by the time development began, the administration had consulted the internationally-respected architect Cesar Manrique and others. The result is low-rise building and magnificent roads, awesome works of engineering all but empty of traffic, with robust, environmentally-sympathetic wooden (rather than metal) crash barriers edging the sheer drops alongside.

The houses on the green terraces are roofed with red tiles and surrounded by trees and gardens. In the villages, the ugly concrete of the pathways, steps and walls has been replaced with hand-crafted, lava-red stone, quarried in the mountains above. The houses are painted in ochres, umbers, yellows or shades of whites, with bougainvillea and passion flowers spilling from the terraces and balconies. At night, the iron street-lamps add to the effect of perfect stage sets created by an inspired designer with romance in mind and millions to spend.

La Gomera has become idyllic. It was always naturally beautiful, but now women can wear high-heels when they go out at night — the pavements are broad and well-lit — and there is little traffic. There is no crime and stag-parties and hen-parties go elsewhere. There are no drunks or hustlers in the street.

If Lanzarote, with its flat landscape punctuated by extraordinary volcanic cones and black, geometrical fields, is a work of art created by man —Cesar Manrique was a native son— Gomera with its towering mountains, ancient forests and deep green gorges is a work of art created by nature.

Nature dominates 80% of La Gomera. While its cliffs and massifs may have been home to the aboriginal Guanches and, today, are home to the giant lizards discovered a few years ago, their inaccessibility preserves them from change. However, fine walking paths and the roads winding thousands of feet above the sea allow the casual visitors to explore widely. It seems that even the remotest hamlet is served by a decent road.

There are no big trucks — none half the size of those we meet on narrow, potholed west Cork roads every day — and no rubbish on the verges. One can drive the 50km from one side of the island to the other without seeing a discarded sweet wrapper. In the towns and villages, the garbage truck (the largest truck I’ve seen) is out morning and evening. A woman municipal worker sweeps the street (not just the pavement) in front of our apartment early each morning. There are litter bins and recycling units everywhere. It is hard to credit that the main road down to the beach was a broken, unlit earthen track when we negotiated it with our three-year old son in almost pitch darkness the night we first arrived in the Valle Gran Rey in 1981. We got off the bus and tried to find the island’s only foreign-owned bar where, we were told, we could get advice on somewhere to stay.

We found it, in a banana plantation, the doorway lit by a single bulb. It is long since gone and fine, new houses have sprung up amongst the bananas. But there are still the barn owls, and I saw one the other night as I walked home late.

We had been listening to locals playing Canarian music outside a bar by the sea. Amongst them, was the son of the owner, Maria, now approaching 90. Maria, whom I have written about many times over the years, recently suffered the indignity of no longer being allowed to sit behind a screen in her own restaurant, watching television, a habit developed in the ten years since her retirement. EU Health and Safety rules decreed that a restaurant could not be, simultaneously, a sitting room. Yes, I’m afraid, some things do change ...