The Best Things to Do in El Hierro

The best things to do on El Hierro are diving in the Mar de las Calmas at La Restinga, standing among the wind-flattened junipers of El Sabinar, looking over the El Golfo valley from César Manrique's Mirador de la Peña, swimming in the volcanic pools at La Maceta and Charco Azul, and driving out to the old lighthouse where the world once ended. There are no resorts, no water parks and barely any traffic. That is the entire proposition.

El Hierro is the smallest and most westerly of the larger Canary Islands: 269 square kilometres, around eleven thousand residents, one small airport and a single ferry port. It is shaped like a horseshoe because a vast chunk of its northern flank slid into the Atlantic in a single catastrophic landslide thousands of years ago, leaving the curved cliff wall and the flat valley floor known as El Golfo. Everything on the island happens on or around that scar.

It is also, in a quiet way, one of the more remarkable places in Europe: a UNESCO biosphere reserve and geopark that generates a very large share of its own electricity from wind and water, and which for centuries marked the western edge of the known world on every map drawn in Europe. If you are still weighing it up, our honest assessment of whether El Hierro is worth visiting is the place to start. This is what to do when you get there.

1. Dive the Mar de las Calmas

The south-western coast is sheltered from the trade wind by the bulk of the island, which gives it the name Mar de las Calmas — the calm sea. It has been a protected marine reserve since the 1990s, and it is widely reckoned to hold the best diving in the Atlantic archipelagos and some of the best in Europe.

The reasons are specific. The island is young and steep, so the sea floor drops away to serious depth within a few hundred metres of shore, bringing open-ocean species close in. The water is warm and clear, with visibility often over thirty metres. And decades of protection mean the fish are numerous, large and entirely unbothered by people — grouper the size of a suitcase will follow you around a dive like dogs. Divers work out of La Restinga, a small working fishing village at the southern tip that exists for boats and for dive centres, with a handful of restaurants and very little else. Our overview of diving in the Canaries compares it with the other islands; the short version is that experienced divers come here specifically and rarely regret it.

2. The volcano that erupted underneath it all

In October 2011 the sea off La Restinga began to boil, stain green and throw up floating chunks of steaming rock. A submarine volcano was erupting roughly two kilometres offshore. The village was evacuated more than once over the following months, the fishing and diving stopped, and thousands of small earthquakes shook the island through the winter.

The eruption ended in early 2012 and left behind a new cone on the sea floor, now named Tagoro, rising to within about ninety metres of the surface. What happened next is the part marine biologists still talk about: the eruption sterilised the sea bed, then the mineral-rich water it released fertilised it, and the whole system recolonised from bare rock within a few years. Divers today visit a habitat barely more than a decade old. If you want to understand why these islands keep doing this sort of thing, our piece on how the Canaries were formed explains the hotspot beneath them.

3. Stand among the junipers of El Sabinar

On the exposed western plateau of La Dehesa stands a small grove of sabinas, Canary junipers, that the wind has bent through ninety degrees and more. Some grow horizontally along the ground; the most famous has curled back on itself into an arch, and has become the unofficial emblem of the island, reproduced on every leaflet and number plate frame on El Hierro.

El Sabinar is reached by a long, lonely road across grazing land, and there is nothing there — no kiosk, no ticket, usually no other car. The trees are several hundred years old and are still alive, still growing, still being pushed over. Go in the late afternoon when the light comes in low and sideways, which is when they look their strangest.

4. Look over El Golfo from the Mirador de la Peña

The Mirador de la Peña is El Hierro's one piece of designer architecture: a low stone-and-glass building by César Manrique, opened at the end of the 1980s, set on the lip of the cliff above the El Golfo valley. Inside there is a restaurant; outside there is a stone terrace and a view down a seven-hundred-metre wall onto banana plantations, vineyards and the sea.

Manrique's principle was that the building should disappear into the rock and the view should do the work, and here it does. The clouds usually sit on the cliff edge in the morning and clear through the day, so late afternoon is the safer bet. Lunch with that view is one of the few genuine splurges available on the island.

5. Swim in the rock pools

El Hierro has almost no sand. What it has instead are natural pools — hollows in the old lava flows along the north coast, deepened and walled slightly by hand, filled and flushed by the Atlantic. La Maceta is the best known, a set of linked pools below the El Golfo cliffs with concrete steps and ladders; Charco Azul nearby is reached through a natural rock arch and is the more photogenic of the two; and Tacorón on the sheltered south coast has calm turquoise water, shade shelters and the easiest entry on the island.

For actual sand, Playa del Verodal in the far west is a startling red-black beach beneath a crumbling cliff — beautiful, frequently dangerous to swim at, and worth the drive regardless. Which spots are safe on which day is set out in El Hierro's beaches and swimming spots, and the wider tradition of these pools across the archipelago is covered in natural pools of the Canaries.

6. Drive to the end of the world

Punta de Orchilla, the island's south-western tip, was for roughly two thousand years the official western edge of the map. Ptolemy placed his prime meridian at the westernmost land known to the ancient world, which was this one; French cartographers formalised the Ferro meridian by royal decree in the seventeenth century, and it stayed in use across much of Europe until Greenwich finally won the argument at an international conference in 1884. Longitude, for a very long time, was measured from here.

What you find today is a rough track down through a lava field to a small white lighthouse, a monument, and the Atlantic with nothing beyond it. The island still calls itself Isla del Meridiano, and it is a properly atmospheric place to stand for ten minutes.

7. The tree that made it rain

El Hierro has no rivers and very little rainfall, and how its first inhabitants survived is the island's best story. The Bimbaches, the pre-conquest islanders, depended on a single enormous tree in the north-east — the Garoé, the holy tree — whose canopy combed water out of the trade-wind cloud that washes over the ridge almost every day. The condensation dripped from its leaves into stone cisterns below, and that was the water supply for a community.

The original was brought down by a storm in 1610. A replacement was planted on the site in 1949, and there is now a small visitor area and a walk up to it. The tree appears on the island's coat of arms, and the principle it demonstrated — that on these islands the fog is worth more than the rain — underlies our piece on where Canarian water actually comes from. Fog collectors on the same principle have since been installed in dry regions around the world.

8. Gorona del Viento, the island that powers itself

Above Valverde, five wind turbines stand on a ridge, connected to a pair of reservoirs at different heights — the upper one sitting inside a volcanic crater. When the wind blows hard, the surplus pumps water uphill; when it drops, the water runs back down through turbines. The hydro-wind station opened in 2014 and turned El Hierro into a case study quoted at energy conferences everywhere.

Be slightly careful with the headline. The island has run entirely on renewable electricity for continuous stretches of several weeks at a time, which is a genuine achievement for a grid with no cable to anywhere, but across a full year the renewable share is closer to half and varies with the weather; a diesel station remains as backup. Nobody on El Hierro pretends otherwise, and the project is still the most interesting thing happening on any Canary Island. You can see the installation from the road; there is a visitor centre in Valverde, the tiny hillside capital, which is also the only place on the island with a set of traffic lights.

9. Walk the old roads

Before the ring road, the island was crossed on foot by caminos reales paved with stone, and they are now waymarked and superb. The Camino de Jinama drops from the ridge at 1,200 metres straight down the El Golfo cliff to the valley floor in a series of zigzags, a route farming families used twice a year when they moved house between their high land and their low land. The Camino de la Virgen crosses the whole island east to west and is used every four years when the statue of the island's patron is carried the entire distance in a festival that empties the villages; the last was in 2025.

The walking here is the equal of any island in the archipelago and far emptier — see our guide to hiking on El Hierro. Look out for the island's giant lizard along the way: Gallotia simonyi was declared extinct, then rediscovered clinging to a cliff in 1974, and is now bred at a recovery centre in the El Golfo valley that you can visit.

10. Do very little, very slowly

The island's real pleasure is not a list. It is driving a road for twenty minutes without meeting a car, eating grilled fish and local wine in a village where nobody is selling you anything, and seeing more stars than you have seen in your life — El Hierro has no meaningful light pollution at all and is a superb, unadvertised stargazing island. The local wine comes from tiny vineyards in the El Golfo valley and rarely leaves the island, and pineapples, figs and cheese all turn up on the same plate.

Accommodation is small guesthouses, rural houses and one or two hotels rather than resorts; our guide to where to stay on El Hierro sets out which corner suits divers, walkers and people who simply want quiet. Getting here means a short flight from Tenerife North or Gran Canaria, or a ferry from Los Cristianos of a couple of hours — the little turboprops that link the islands fly here several times a day.

Is it worth the effort?

Only if the list above sounds like a holiday to you. There is no nightlife, the beaches are rocks, the weather in the north is often cloudy, and the shops shut. What you get in exchange is the quietest of the Canary Islands by a distance, world-class diving, walking that has no crowds at any time of year, and the odd sensation of being somewhere that decided not to become a resort.

Three days covers the sights; five lets you dive, walk and slow down, which is the point. Anyone weighing it against its neighbours will find the comparison in our look at the quietest island in the Canaries — and the fuller picture of El Hierro itself is the place to plan from.