La Gomera

Our delightfully lost experience of La Gomera

We arrived in La Gomera not entirely sure what to expect, and left slightly convinced we’d stumbled onto the Canary Islands’ best-kept secret. Only one percent of visitors to the archipelago actually make it here, and most of those just come for a day trip from Tenerife. Their loss, honestly.

This is an island that likes to keep you on your toes. One night our taxi driver Carlos stopped the car in the pitch dark, told us to get out, and walked us down a path with nothing but a flashlight. For a few seconds we genuinely thought we were being taken somewhere very different from a scenic viewpoint. Turned out to be one of the most beautiful lookout points on the island, courtesy of the artist Cesar Manrique. We also learned, somewhat unexpectedly, that the little white dots on the local cacti are lice used to make red lipstick dye. Nobody warns you about that in the brochures.

We’ve hiked through fog-covered laurel forests in Garajonay National Park, listened to locals whistle entire conversations to each other across ravines, tried our hand at watching whales and dolphins from a boat, and eaten our body weight in palm honey. We even got mildly attached to a pottery maker named Martin who shaped a bowl in front of us in about two minutes flat.

This is our growing collection of La Gomera guides, built from real trips, real detours, and more than a few moments of getting delightfully lost. Read on for everything we found.