Where to Stay in La Gomera

Base yourself in Valle Gran Rey if you want a beach and a scene, San Sebastián if you want ferries, shops and a short taxi from the airport, Playa de Santiago if you want sun and quiet, and Hermigua or Agulo if you are here to walk in the forest. La Gomera is only 22 kilometres across, and yet the choice matters more here than on any other Canary Island, because the geography makes moving between those four places a genuine undertaking.

The reason is the shape of the place. La Gomera is a worn volcanic dome split by deep radial ravines running from the central plateau to the sea, like the segments of an orange. There is no coast road. Every journey between two coastal villages goes up over the top and down again, so distances that look trivial on a map take forty minutes to an hour and a half by road.

Get that into your head before you book and the rest is easy: pick the valley that matches your holiday, accept that you will not be popping over to the other side for dinner, and enjoy one of the quietest islands in Europe. If you are still deciding whether to come at all, our honest assessment of the island is the place to start.

The 20-kilometre rule

Here is the single most useful number for planning on La Gomera: reckon on roughly an hour for every 25 kilometres of road, and add more if anyone in the car is prone to travel sickness. The roads are in good condition and the surfaces are excellent — this is not a pothole problem. It is a geometry problem. The road from San Sebastián to Valle Gran Rey is about 50 kilometres and takes around ninety minutes, climbing to 1,000 metres through the laurel forest and then descending a series of hairpins that locals take considerably faster than you will.

The consequence is that a week split between two bases beats a week driving in and out from one. Three or four nights on the sunny south or west side and three in the green north is the shape most returning visitors settle on.

Valle Gran Rey — the beach base

Valle Gran Rey is the closest thing the island has to a resort, and it is nothing like a Canarian resort as you would recognise it elsewhere. A vast terraced valley of palms and banana plots drops to a scatter of low seafront villages — La Playa, Vueltas, La Puntilla, Borbalán — with apartments, a handful of small hotels, dive schools, yoga retreats and a good number of restaurants.

It has the island's best swimming and its liveliest evenings, such as they are: a drum circle at sunset, a bar with live music, people who came for a fortnight in 1978 and stayed. German travellers found this valley in the 1970s and never really left, which is why you will see menus in German before English and why the health-food shops are unusually good. The beaches at the valley mouth are dark sand, and the Atlantic here is powerful — pay attention to the flags.

Stay here if you want to swim daily, want restaurant choice, are travelling without a car, or are staying a week or more and want somewhere that feels like a place rather than a hotel.

San Sebastián — the practical base

The capital, San Sebastián de La Gomera, is where the ferries dock and where the island's administrative life happens. It is a small, handsome port town with a genuinely old core: Columbus watered his ships at the well here in 1492, and the town has dined out on it ever since. There is a dark-sand town beach, a supermarket that is better than anything else on the island, banks, a hospital and the parador on the cliff above.

It is also the only base from which day trips in several directions are practical, and the only one within easy reach of the airport in the south. Nobody would call it beautiful in the way the valleys are, and evenings are quiet, but it is the sensible choice for a short stay, a first night, or a trip built around the ferry crossings to and from Tenerife.

Stay here if you are here for two or three nights, arriving late, leaving early, or want to be able to reach the whole island without committing to one valley.

Playa de Santiago — sun and silence

On the dry southern coast, Playa de Santiago gets the most reliable sunshine on the island, because the trade-wind cloud that sits on the north tends to break up before it reaches here. It is a small former fishing village with a pebble beach, a harbour, a few restaurants and one large clifftop hotel with gardens and a golf course above.

It is the quietest of the four main bases by some margin, and it is ten minutes from the airport. The downside is that there is very little to do in the evening, and the swimming is on pebbles rather than sand.

Stay here if you want winter sun and calm, are flying in rather than sailing, or want a hotel with a pool and a view rather than an apartment.

Hermigua and Agulo — the walkers' north

The northern valleys are the green half of the island, and for anyone here to hike they are the obvious base. Hermigua is a long ribbon of a village running down a banana-terraced valley, with drying racks, old water channels and a series of casas rurales strung along the road. Agulo, smaller and tighter, sits on a shelf above the sea with Teide filling the horizon across the water — it is often called the prettiest village on the island and it is hard to argue.

Both put you within twenty minutes of the edge of Garajonay National Park, which is the reason most walkers come. The forest here is laurisilva, a relic subtropical woodland that covered southern Europe before the Ice Ages and survives in only a handful of Atlantic islands. Rain and cloud are more frequent than on the south coast, and the sea swimming is limited to a couple of sheltered spots and a tidal pool.

Stay here if walking is the point of the trip, you have a car, and a grey afternoon in a cloud forest sounds appealing rather than disappointing. Vallehermoso, on the north-west coast, is a slightly wilder alternative with fewer visitors and good access to the island's western trails.

Choosing by the kind of trip

What you will actually be sleeping in

La Gomera has no large resort hotels and no all-inclusive trade. The stock is apartments, small family hotels, a handful of mid-size hotels in Valle Gran Rey and Playa de Santiago, the parador above San Sebastián, and a substantial network of restored village houses. Those last are the island's real strength — the terraced valleys are full of stone houses with a terrace over the banana plots, and how rural houses work here is worth reading before you book, particularly the bit about needing a car.

Prices are moderate by Canarian standards and there is little seasonal madness, though Christmas, Easter and the German summer holidays tighten supply sharply. Book the north months ahead in autumn, which is peak walking season.

Getting there and getting around

Most people arrive by ferry from Los Cristianos on Tenerife into San Sebastián — roughly an hour on a fast ferry, longer on the conventional ship. There are also small inter-island flights into the airport near Playa de Santiago. Timetables and operators change, so check current schedules; our sister site viamo.net tracks ferry routes and transfers across the region.

On the island, buses radiate from San Sebastián to each main valley a few times a day — enough to be useful if your plans are simple, nowhere near enough to build a walking holiday around. Taxis exist but the distances make them expensive. For anything beyond a beach week in one valley, hire a car, and hire it before you arrive, because the island's fleet is small and sells out.

The bottom line

If you are coming once and want everything to work, take Valle Gran Rey for the beach half of the week and Hermigua for the walking half, with the ferry in and out of San Sebastián. If you have only a few nights, stay in the capital and accept that you will see less of the island than you hoped. And if what you actually want is sunshine and nothing happening, the island's dark-sand coves at Playa de Santiago will do it better than anywhere else in the archipelago at this price.