“My husband is a cave man,” says my guide, Maria Lezcano, who is leading me through the deeply cut 1,500-metre Guayadeque Ravine. She points to a cave house dotting the hillside and explains that her husband was born in one just like it. The ravine's natural cavities are connected by pathways lined with potted plants and views overlooking the lush green chasm leading to the sea. These are bona-fide cave neighbourhoods – there's even a cave church where locals go to pray. Maria points out beehives stashed in the canyon's nooks. The salvia, succulents and wild lavender make for great honey, she tells me.
I've just arrived on Gran Canaria, home of the notorious tourist trap Las Palmas, known for packaged tours, beaches crammed with faded blue lounge chairs, tourists flocking for suntans and cheesy hotel bars. But I've come to see something different. My mission is to explore the Canary Islands, the Spanish-ruled specks off the coast of north Africa, hopping from island to island, searching for something special, far from the crowds.
It turns out I don't need to channel my inner Christopher Columbus after all. All I have to do is rent a car and catch a few ferries.
Gran Canaria
“We're a mini-continent,” Maria says about her island, and I later learn the same goes for the other islands I visit. You can be in Gran Canaria's arid south in the morning amid the dunes of Maspalomas, and later that day on the island's interior, walking through Los Pinos de Galdar – a Canarian pine forest growing on the west slope of a volcano 1,000 metres up in the mountains, where the trees have adapted to survive 400-degree fires. Maria and I walk among the pines. “This reminds me of my childhood home on Vancouver Island,” I remark. Not something I'd expect to find off the coast of Morocco.
Tenerife
On the one-hour ferry crossing to Tenerife, the largest of the island group, I look onto its biggest city, Santa Cruz, framed with craggy, sand-coloured mountains. Tenerife receives about five million tourists a year, but I'm still set on experiencing something exceptional.
“Today, we visit Machu Picchu,” my friend Carlos Miles says as we load into the rental. Carlos is a local who's explored every square inch of the island; I like where this is going.
We drive high into the mountains, cranking the wheel, hugging the vivid green switchbacks. The landscape is so raw and ancient it's easy to imagine how volcanic eruptions formed this island 12 million years ago, magma stacking against itself to create these wild peaks and ridges. Atop one of the folds is Masca, a village settled more than 500 years ago, but only connected by road to the rest of Tenerife in the mid-seventies. It really does resemble a living Machu Picchu. Before the road, the village was easily forgotten, virtually unknown since it was so difficult to reach.
It's late afternoon and all the coaches are gone, so I can stroll along the zigzag paths in peace. The very edge of one pathway ends in a drop plunging down the mountainside, backed by the blue ocean. People with more time than I make the four-hour hike from here to the sea, where they are picked up by boat. I make a promise for next time.
Source: The Globe and Mail
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