Damien Enright: Visit the first city in Canaries but watch the raindrops!
We were warned! In La Gomera, in bright sunlight, by a blue sea and white surf washing onto clean black sand, a friend warned us against La Laguna weather, writes . Changeable as Ireland, he said.
If we insisted on visiting the Unesco World Heritage site on Tenerife in April, we should bring thermal underwear and sou’westers. He had studied at La Laguna’s famed university; his most outstanding memory was of looking down on Santa Cruz, the island capital, basking in the sun below him while his teeth chattered and his bones ached from damp.
The capital is 4m above sea level, while La Laguna is 540m above, a journey of 9km. It’s a green and ancient world, but best visited in summer.
Alonso Fernández de Lugo, the cruel and rapacious conquistador who conquered the islands of La Palma and Tenerife in bloody battles with the indigenous Guanche people — whom he slaughtered or took as slaves — founded La Laguna in 1497.
It was the first city in the Canary Islands and became the template for many of the Spanish settlements in the colonised Americas. The Canaries were Spain’s first “America”. Here, much of the experimentation in the conquest and settlement of new lands were practised.
My wife and I went to La Laguna despite our friend’s advice, taking a two-hour ferry voyage from Valle Gran Rey in Gomera to big, bustling Santa Cruz, where we boarded the tram climbing uphill on the scenic route to the old city.
La Laguna is outstandingly beautiful. In the extensive old town, every street is ancient, lined with houses built between the late 14th and late 18th century. There is a cathedral, and many old churches and inns. It is a world redolent of antiquity at every turning. Unfortunately, it rained often when we were there.
We stayed at a 15th-century posada, renovated for comfort but with all the original floorboards, staircases, doors, shuttered windows and elegant roof beams soaring above us, twice the height of a normal ceiling.
Our room was near stateroom size, with a fine, white marble fireplace. The bed was king size, with a carved and painted 15th-century bedhead; gauzy mosquito netting, voluminous as a marquee, curtained down from above. The bathroom had all mod cons.
The only other modernity was a repro wood stove functioning on electricity. The rental was €51 per night, breakfast included.
We did not rent it on Airbnb, which would not accept the personal data we use for other sites trouble-free. It would not accept our address, whatever we did. It drove us near crazy, wasting a morning. Never again!
We were very grateful for the modern wood stove when we returned from our initial La Laguna expedition.
We’d arrived at the guesthouse about 5pm. Our warm host whisked us off on a tour of the premises, his family home, taking us through corridors and inner courtyards open to sky, to the commodious self-service breakfast room which was furnished with fine ware, cutlery and crockery and stocked with sweet cakes, pasties, croissant, eggs, hams, cheeses and five teas and coffees.
The above-mentioned initial expedition was in search of a restaurant — certain, in that town, to be unique — which we didn’t find because, hardly were we 10 minutes from base when it started raining, and became very cold. Heading for home, we relearned some of the eccentricities of medieval Spain which we’d forgotten.
In Ireland, and most European countries, when it rains, one hugs the house facades because the gutter pipes above give some shelter. We did this, instinctively. However, the colonial architecture has no gutters but, rather, pipes extending at right angles from the roofs and issuing onto the street below.
Even after the first dousing we tended to forget this. The rain got heavier, the pipes issued cataracts, and rounding corners, we sometimes forgot to stay at street centre and walked straight under a torrent which wet us head to toe.
Meanwhile, the centres of the cobbled streets, with shallow runnels to take away the water, were deep enough to soak the shoes. So, it required fine calculation to avoid the waterfalls from above, and the rivulets from below. The answer of course, was an umbrella and galoshes, but we had neither, nor could we buy them.
We at last found shelter in a bodega, the most ancient in Tenerife, where we ate Serrano ham and Manchego and local cheese and sampled local wine.
I would advise Irish Tenerife holidaymakers to leave the sun-drenched southern concrete deserts and sun-blasted deserts and visit cultural La Laguna. It’s an hour’s bus ride, unique and well worth it. But pick a good day!
