Puerto de la Aldea

Puerto de la Aldea is the small harbour at the end of Gran Canaria's wildest coast: a pebble beach, a line of fish restaurants under tamarisk trees, a stone jetty, and behind it a freshwater lagoon where once a year the whole town jumps in to catch fish with their hands. It is about as far from Playa del Ingles as it is possible to get on this island, in every sense that matters.

The port serves the town of La Aldea de San Nicolas, a couple of kilometres inland, which sits in a broad green valley of greenhouses and banana plots surrounded on three sides by mountains and on the fourth by the Atlantic. This is the west of Gran Canaria, the side with no resorts, no airport road and until relatively recently no reliable road at all. Getting here is a large part of the experience.

What you come for is straightforward: the drive, the fish, the emptiness, and — if you time it right — one of the strangest and most genuinely local festivals in the Canary Islands. What you do not come for is a beach holiday. The beach is pebble, the water is cold and open, and there is no resort infrastructure whatsoever.

The town with two names

You will see this place called two different things on maps, signs and bus timetables, and both are correct. The municipality was founded and long known as San Nicolas de Tolentino, after the saint. Locally, though, everybody has always called it simply La Aldea — "the village" — and the people of it are aldeanos.

In the 2000s the municipality formally adopted the double-barrelled name La Aldea de San Nicolas, making official what everyone had said for centuries. It is a small thing, but it captures the place neatly: a community isolated enough, and sure enough of itself, that its nickname eventually beat its official name in a vote.

Why the isolation matters

Until the second half of the twentieth century, La Aldea was effectively an island on an island. The mountains behind it are severe, the tracks over them were mule tracks, and the practical way in and out was by sea. The tomato crop that the valley grew for export went out from this little harbour by boat, and the mail and the passengers came the same way.

That is why the port exists at all, and why a place with no fishing fleet to speak of has a stone jetty and a proper harbour wall. It also explains the particular character of the valley — a self-contained farming community with its own accent, its own festivals and a long tradition of doing without. When you eat lunch by the water here you are sitting at what was, within living memory, the front door of the whole municipality.

The beach and the charco

The beach at the port is a broad bank of rounded grey pebbles, steep at the water's edge, with a strong shore break when there is any swell running. It is a beach for sitting on and paddling at rather than swimming off, and on a rough day it is not a beach for going into the water at all. There is no lifeguard.

Behind it, separated from the sea by the pebble bank, lies the charco: a shallow brackish lagoon fed by the valley's watercourse, fringed with reeds. It looks unremarkable, and for 364 days a year it is. On one day it is the centre of the island's most unusual festival.

The Fiesta del Charco

On 11 September each year, La Aldea holds the Fiesta del Charco. At a signal — traditionally the firing of a rocket, in the late afternoon — several thousand people run into the lagoon fully clothed and attempt to catch the grey mullet living in it with their bare hands. Within minutes the water is churned to mud and everyone in it is filthy. It is riotous, it is very funny to watch, and it is taken entirely seriously.

The tradition is old. It derives from embarbascar, a pre-Hispanic fishing method in which the sap of euphorbia was used to stun fish in coastal pools so they could be gathered by hand — a technique recorded among the island's pre-conquest inhabitants and continued for centuries afterwards. The chemical part has long gone; the collective wade has not. Documentary references to the custom in this valley go back hundreds of years, and the fiesta is officially recognised for its cultural interest.

Eating at the port

The row of restaurants behind the beach is the main reason people drive here on an ordinary Sunday. They are plain places — tiled floors, paper tablecloths, a terrace facing the sea — and they do fresh fish, limpets, octopus, and the standard Canarian accompaniments, at prices that reflect a town with no tourists rather than a resort.

Order what is on the board rather than what is on the printed menu, expect to pay by weight for whole fish, and expect service to slow to a halt between two and four on a Sunday afternoon because everybody in the valley is eating at once. Our page on Canarian fish and seafood explains the species names; the local speciality worth asking for is anything grilled plain with mojo.

The GC-200: the drive from Agaete

The road north from La Aldea to Agaete is one of the great drives in the Canary Islands and, historically, one of the most notorious. The GC-200 runs along the base of the island's north-west cliffs — some of the highest sea cliffs in Europe — on a shelf cut into the rock, climbing, hairpinning and diving in and out of short tunnels, with the Atlantic several hundred metres directly below.

Two things to know before you commit. First, the road has been substantially rebuilt over the last decade or so, with long new tunnels replacing the most exposed and rockfall-prone sections; it is considerably safer than the road of its reputation, though still a slow, demanding drive. Second, sections of this coast are periodically closed after heavy rain or rockfall, and the closures are real rather than precautionary. Check locally before you set off, and do not assume a satnav knows. Our notes on driving in the islands cover mountain roads generally.

Allow far more time than the distance suggests — this is well under an hour of map distance and considerably more of actual driving, with stops. And there will be stops. The Mirador del Balcon, on this stretch, is a walkway projecting over the cliff with a view along the whole Andén Verde coast, and it is one of the finest viewpoints on Gran Canaria.

The southern road, and Gui Gui

Southwards, the GC-200 continues towards Mogan through Tasarte and Veneguera, a long, empty, endlessly winding run through barrancos with almost no habitation. It is slower going than it looks but it is a spectacular piece of road and it delivers you to the Veneguera and Puerto Mogan side of the island.

From Tasartico, in this municipality, a serious hiking path crosses the mountains to Playa de Gui Gui — the island's most famous inaccessible beach, a wide golden bay with no road, reached on foot over a col in two to three hours each way, or by boat. It is a proper hike with no water, no shade and real exposure; our guide to hiking on Gran Canaria treats it as the committing outing it is.

What else is in the valley

The town itself is workaday rather than picturesque: greenhouses, a grid of streets, a church and some good bakeries. There is a small museum of local life and, on the road in from the south, Cactualdea, a large cactus collection with a Guanche cave, a dragon tree and a Canarian wrestling ring, which is a better hour than it sounds.

The valley's economy is still largely agricultural, and the sea of plastic greenhouses you drive past growing tomatoes and cucumbers is not scenic but is the reason the town exists in its modern form. It is also, quietly, one of the last places on Gran Canaria where farming rather than tourism pays the wages.

Getting here

You want a car. Buses do reach La Aldea — the Global network runs services from Las Palmas via Agaete and from the south — but they are infrequent, the journey is long, and the timetable will not let you linger over lunch. Our guide to buses on Gran Canaria sets out what is realistic.

The natural way to do it is as a loop: north coast to Agaete, the cliff road down to La Aldea, lunch at the port, and back over the mountains through Artenara or south along the GC-200 — a full day, mostly driving, and one of the best days on Gran Canaria. Our page on day trips on the island has the alternatives if that sounds like too much road.

So, is it worth the drive?

Yes, if you understand what you are driving to. Puerto de la Aldea is not a pretty harbour village in the Puerto Mogan sense; it is a functional little port with pebbles, tamarisks and good fish, in a place that is memorable mostly because of how hard it used to be to reach and how completely the mountains still enclose it.

Come for the road and stay for lunch. Come on 11 September and you will see a thousand people wading into a muddy lagoon in their best clothes for reasons that go back to before the Spanish arrived, which is not something the south of the island can offer. And if the west coast appeals more generally, the cliffs at Tamadaba and the harbour at Puerto de las Nieves complete the picture — as does our roundup of the island's beaches, which explains why almost none of the good ones are on this side.