El Hierro 2.0
There is one ferry a day here and it docks within 100 m of where we are moored. It arrived the previous night and its engines/ generators continued unil late. We woke at a reasonable time and had breakfast. It was a warm pleasant morning, but this is a quiet port (on the Northeast coast) unless the ferry is coming or going. It seems to arrive at 8.00pm and leaves at 10.00am each day from Tenerife.
We had booked a car to hire which we collected at 10.00am at the ferry terminal which was convenient and we headed on the road up to the capital 7 km away called Valverde – which according to the guidebook you should just pass through. We headed on toward La Rastinga which is the only other port on the Island (right on the south) and from where all the diving takes place. The whole of the south side of the Island is a special zone and anchoring is not permitted. We arrived at La Resting, the port and noted that it would have been difficult to have brought Stormbird here although the harbour had restaurants and bars and shops nearby, unlike Estraca which is where we were. We found a dive company (although we saw lots of people in wetsuits and arranged to dive the next day and hopefully we will use our own scuba gear which we had onboard.
Once we arranged this, we set off to explore the Island further and we decided to stop at a centre which was created following the recent volcanic activity in 2011 and 2012. No, I am not joking.
In September 2011 there was some volcanic activity off the south of the Island in the sea a few kilometres off the south coast from La Restinga. This killed a lot of fish life and continued in various forms until it declined at the middle of March 2012. This has resulted in two new volcanic cones being created but under the surface of the sea about 90m down. During this activity volcanic gases bubbled at the surface and created a green stain on a large area of the sea on the south of the Island. Huge lumps of lava came to the surface and floated with smoke streaming off them and once cooled they sunk. Some of these lumps were picked up and this centre we visited had pictures and video footage of this. La Restinga had to be evacuated and the main tunnel through part of the Island (which we went through twice in the day) was closed. It was an interesting reminder about volcanoes and that they can erupt at any time. In fact, all of the Canaries are volcanic and were created by such activity. The fish life has returned to normal again.
We continued from the centre to the west of the Island to a part called El Gofo – which is what was left when 50,000 years ago when a third of the Island disappeared into the sea which is why it is a third smaller than its original size. The centre also pointed out that Malpaso, the highest peak is 1,501m, however, it is on a sea floor of 4,000m so that in reality it is 5,501m and therefore as high as Mont Blanc.
We arrived at a place right on the coast called La Maceta which had some sea water pools where the waves were crashing over the pools. It was late so we had a nice lunch at the restaurant and then we went for a dip in the pools. This was very nice and we had brought our mask and snorkels and surprisingly there were fish in these pools although the waves crashing over on a regular basis made snorkelling difficult. There were no changing facilities, so we sort of changed by the car like we used to do years ago as kids with a towel on the beach!.
We then drove back toward Estraca and stopped at a lovely village called El Tamadu which had a sheltered bay which had been made delightful in that it has steps to go into the sea and a wooden walkway to go round it. There were locals swimming, paddle boarding and snorkelling. The water was so clear. We thought we shall return and made our way back to the boat.
We had pretty well done a circuit of the Island in one day. It is quite barren although there is quite a lot of greenery and trees some way up the hills. There are no real steep ravines but hillocks really. It is very agricultural and we saw lots of agricultural terraces and quite a lot no longer seemed to be used. We saw cows and sheep and horses for the first time of any of the Islands and you got a sense that there are few tourists and it is lived in. It was warm and there were some nice villages, but life is slow and quiet here. There was a lot of lava which had not been covered which seemed surprising bearing in mind how long ago the last eruption on land was. There is one thing we have noticed is how clear and clean the water is here which hopefully we will see tomorrow when we dive. I think this is a quiet gentle Island and whilst beautiful there is not a lot of activity here. I think that the diving is a great pull and I will report back tomorrow on that as well as serious hikers.
We returned to the boat and got all our diving gear out in preparation for tomorrow. We had a light supper whilst watching the ferry dock!.
We read our paddy book (diving)stuff and prepared for tomorrow.
If you have any questions, comments, suggestions – do email me on hine.nick9@gmail.com