Green Gomera explodes in riot of colour and song

GREEN Gomera! This small Canary Island that, tragically, had 10% of its land mass and 30% of its World Heritage forests devastated by fires only seven months ago is now greener than Ireland.

I have never, in 32 years of extended visits, seen it so green.

Happily, we were not on the island for the rains that fell all winter (although they were, almost certainly more pleasant than the rains that fell all winter in Ireland) but what a change they have brought.

In November, when we last visited, the blackened hillsides and skeletal forests seemed like they would never recover. In fact, they have not yet recovered — the giant heathers and laurels will takes decades, not months, to re-grow — but native grasses and wild flowers have painted the hills in the green of regeneration, and their mantle hides the blackened shrubs and scorched earth.

What a sight the knees-high meadows make, bathed in sunlight, with wild flower carpets extending in solid acres of colour over land that supported cacti, succulents and little else, terraces long since abandoned for want of water, built on the precipitous slopes by hardy generations past that cultivated every possible inch of land and hewed pasture and wheat fields out of mountainside .

If the dead that created the long strip fields that hang 3,000 feet above the valley floor could see them now, once again all green and fecund, what would they think of climate change, those men and women who lived to see drought descend and over a decade parch their land in some sudden desertification of the last century, sending their sons emigrating to Venezuela and Cuba as indentured labourers on the sugar plantations, most of them never to return.

Nature is cruel or kind as if on a whim, and the ineffectualness of man is almost the stuff of comedy were it not for the bitter reality that results.

But now is the season of fruitfulness, not yet mellow but full of promise. Blossom bedecks all the fruit trees and the vines put on leaf, as do the spuds in the neat, drilled fields. The rains seem to be over, although last night we had a soft, misty drizzle — but no, not drizzle; drizzle sounds bitter. This rain was gentle and slow in falling, as light as down and, of course, not cold.

Meanwhile, one of nature’s local innovations is a strident blackbird that perches on top of a palmera between the small cluster of houses that comprises ‘our’ village and gives forth aria upon aria to the morning and evening air. I think I have never heard a blackbird so melodically inventive; I would think it had cross-bred with a song thrush, but there are no thrushes here. La Gomera blackbirds were always shyer than their Irish cousins, barely glimpsed as they rocketed through the banana plantations. But this bird is a trail-blazer. Perhaps he is under the spell of Gerardo’s canaries. We, their neighbours, sitting on the terrace of the house, can hardly hear ourselves for birdsong.

Years ago, comedians portraying a prototypical Carruthers, a hapless British official upholding the flag of Empire in darkest Africa, would echo his complaint, “I don’t mind the heat but will those damn drums never stop!” Those humans who have not music in their souls might say the same about Gerardo’s canaries, singing from dawn to dusk in their aviary: “I don’t mind the heat but will those damn canaries never stop!”

Walking in the mountains, I had the privilege of hearing a cock canary singing from the top of a pitera with the evening sun lighting his vivid breast — a breast across which a shadow unfortunately fell precluding a flawless photograph.

That evening, I also photographed a fine example of the priority given by the tourism-conscious local government to palmeras over people. Canary palms are, of course, the iconic tree of the islands, and woe betide anyone who cuts one down. A great number were burnt in the holocausts of last August but some, even with trunks blackened by the fires, put out fronds of golden dates, shining in the sun against the perfect sky.