Amerys Travels 2009- Gran Canaria- the north of the island.

We will start with the furthest point we visited, Playa de las Nieves in the North West, noted for it’s fish restaurants, the ferry to Tenerife, the pretty little chapel called Ermita de las Nieves, and the almost impossibility to find a car park, even now in what is the quiet season for the Canary Islands. Heaven help you if you visit November to April (high season) or July and August (summer school holidays)



The bigger town of Agate nearby was reputed to have some nice buildings, but after going round and round the tiny one way streets of the old town, we gave up on it due to our inability to park.

Parking seems to be the Gran Canaria Achilles heel, except in central Palma and parts of the most modern of the southern tourist resorts – and smaller towns particularly need to do something about it if they want us tourists to visit and spend money.

Not too bad for parking in Santa Maria de Guia, a pleasant little town famous for it’s Queso de Flor (cheese of flowers) made from sheep and goats cheese and the flowers of the cardoon thistle. Not nice enough to be worth the trip, in our opinion.
Next stop was Galdar, a very pretty town (again car parking difficult) noted for the famous (at least in Gran Canaria) Cueva Pintada, or painted cave- geometric designs placed there by the aboriginal Guanche people who were here before the Spanish came. Not up to the caves found elsewhere in terms of wall paintings, France, for example) but some interesting stone age village remains of houses, and the house recreation in the photo.


More interesting, we felt, was the Guanche people’s Cenobio de valeron (convent of the valley) which is a collection of 300 caves hollowed out of the rock, mostly within a big sheltering cave. For hundreds of years They have been thought to be the cells of eharimaguadas- the young virgins of the island- who were sent there under the care of the nuns to protect their purity until they were old enough to marry.

You can just picture the young men of the island clambering up the steep slope (see picture of Christine) to the caves in the dead of night, intent on a liaison with one of the young virgins, and being beaten back by the protective nuns, while the girls watched on, giggling with excitement.

What a shame that the less than romantic modern historians have now decided that they were merely grain storage caves!

Another town in the North-east we liked was Teror, with it’s many nice traditional Canarian balconies.

We have also included with this posting some pictures of the famous Cave Restaurante Togoror, and, just down the road, a cave church.

And now time we moved on- all in all, Gran Canaria is a nice size island for a couple of week’s holiday at any time of the year, but best in May or June when it’s quieter and it’s easier to park. It seems you can expect around 30c most of the time with little or no rain (at least in the South) but it can be very hot at times.

An amusing note, now we have finished with Gran Canaria and flown 1,000 miles north to Moraira, on the Costa Blanca in mainland Spain.
I was having a haircut this morning, and bemoaned to the hairdresser that after seven yearly holidays in mainland Spain we still have not found Letche-letche, which is very common in all the Canary islands. After I explained that it was half an inch of condensed milk in a small glass topped up with strong black coffee (you stir up as much of the milk as you wish) she said ‘oh, you mean a Bon-Bon- any bar will do it here!”

Needless to say, our next instalment will be from Moraira.

Richard (and of course Christine)