Santa Cruz de La Palma; Sunday, 26 February, 2023

I had an all day tour booked, with a pickup time just after 9am so I had to have an early breakfast to get out to the pickup point in time.

The tour was marketed as a tour of some of the key sights of the island, with a particular focus on the Roque de los Muchachos – the original volcano that helped to form the island and still the highest point on La Palma. I had worried that the tour would cover a lot of the same ground as the tour I’d done on the Friday, but in the end only two stops were repeats with the last stop on the Friday tour becoming the first stop today – albeit with a lot more cloud and no views of the volcano.

The cloud would turn out to be a repeat issue throughout the day, and this was probably worse at the next stop the Mirador del Time high above the gorge that Puerto de Tazacorte is located at the end of – rather than getting the stunning views up to the caldera of the volcano and the scenes of multiple lava flows over the centuries that have ended in the seas here we were instead greeted with a wall of cloud that stopped at the view point – everything out to sea, to the north of us and above us was clear blue sky, but all the interesting things to see were hidden behind a wall of cloud.

After the viewpoint the next stop was the farmers market in Puntagorda, located close to where the climb up to the highest point starts. The market houses both a farmers market and a craft market, the latter being aimed very much at tourists rather than locals, though it looked like the farmers market side was very popular with locals. This was also the place where we were recommended to grab some lunch as there were no other options anywhere else, so I had a slice of very pleasant focaccia pizza whilst looking down into another gorge formed by a collapsed volcano before it was time to move on.

The next leg of the journey was a near 90 minute drive up the twisting winding road to the summit of the Roque de los Muchachos at over 2,400m above sea level. The final few minutes of the journey being on the high plane above the top of the clouds which offers one of the best locations in the world to set up telescopes and is consequently home to many of the worlds most important earth based telescopes.

At the summit of the mountain we had about 45 minutes to explore and wander around a part of the rim of the former volcano, though once again cloud cover below us mostly just left jagged crags of rock standing out from the cloud, like shark fins in the clouds.

A short drive back down the side of the volcano and we stopped at a view point on the rim of the caldera where you can look down into, in our case the clouds, the crater of the volcano on one side of the road and on the other look north up the island, down the slope of the volcano stretching all the way to the northern point of La Palma.

There was a brief stop about an hour later at the Real Santuario de Nuestra Señora de las Nieves, located high above Santa Cruz, this church houses a statue of the Virgin of the Snows that once every 5 years is processed down into Santa Cruz as part of a major religious festival. This stop was followed up by another visit to the Mirador de La Concepción before we returned back to Los Cancajos just in time for a final swim of the trip and then dinner.