The best things to do on La Gomera are walking in the misty laurel forest of Garajonay, dropping into the terraced amphitheatre of Valle Gran Rey, taking a boat to the organ-pipe cliffs of Los Órganos, hearing the island's whistled language, and spending an afternoon in San Sebastián where Columbus filled his water barrels before sailing west. It is a small, steep, quiet island, and the single most useful piece of advice is to give it more time than the day trip most visitors allow.

La Gomera is round, roughly 370 square kilometres, and shaped like an orange with the segments cut out. Deep ravines radiate from a high forested centre down to the sea, which means there is almost no flat ground and almost no coast road — getting from one valley to the next means driving up and over the middle. Distances on the map bear no relation to time in the car.

That geography explains everything else about the place: the terraces built up every hillside, the whistled language invented to talk across the gorges, the villages that stayed separate enough to keep their own character, and the fact that mass tourism never really arrived. There are no high-rise resorts here and no big airport. For the honest pros and cons, see our piece on whether La Gomera is worth visiting; what follows is what to do once you are on the ferry.

1. Walk in Garajonay's cloud forest

Garajonay National Park covers the high centre of the island and protects the largest surviving stretch of laurisilva in the world — a subtropical cloud forest of laurel, heather and moss that once covered much of southern Europe and the Mediterranean basin, and retreated to a handful of Atlantic islands when the climate dried out millions of years ago. Walking into it is genuinely disorienting: the temperature drops, the light goes green, everything drips, and the trunks are furred with moss and ferns.

It has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1986. The forest waters the whole island — the trees comb moisture directly out of the trade-wind cloud that sits on the ridge most days, a process that delivers more water to the ground than the rainfall alone ever could. Easy circular walks start from the Laguna Grande picnic area and from El Cedro, and the summit of Alto de Garajonay at 1,487 metres is a twenty-minute climb from the nearest road with a view of Teide across the water. Dozens of waymarked routes run out from the park into the valleys below, and walking on La Gomera maps out the best of them.

The park takes its name from a pre-conquest legend: Gara, a girl from the north of the island, and Jonay, a young man who swam over from Tenerife, fled to the summit when their families objected and died there together. The tourist board has never had to invent anything.

2. Drive to Roque Agando and the viewpoints

Roque Agando is the great stone thumb that rises beside the main road across the middle of the island, one of several volcanic plugs left standing when softer rock eroded away around them. There is a viewpoint at its foot, and on a clear morning it frames the whole southern half of the island below.

Viewpoints are, in fact, the island's default attraction. The most theatrical is the Mirador de Abrante above Agulo, where a glass walkway juts out over a six-hundred-metre drop with the village directly below and Tenerife filling the horizon. Walking out onto the glass is briefly unpleasant even if you have no fear of heights, which is rather the point.

3. Take a boat to Los Órganos

Los Órganos is a cliff face on the wild northern coast made of hundreds of vertical basalt columns, packed together like the pipes of a church organ and sheared off flat by the sea. The columns formed as a body of lava cooled slowly and cracked into hexagons, and the Atlantic has since cut through the middle of it to show the cross-section.

There is no road and no path. The only way to see it is by boat, and the trips run from Valle Gran Rey and from Playa de Santiago, taking most of a morning. Two honest warnings: the north coast is exposed, so trips are cancelled in any swell, and the boat cannot always get close enough for the full effect. Ask the operator what the sea has been doing that week rather than booking blind on day one — leave it until later in your stay so you can pick the calm morning.

4. Hear silbo gomero

The island's whistled language is the thing people remember longest. Silbo gomero is not a code or a set of signals — it is Spanish itself, with the vowels and consonants rendered as pitches and breaks in a whistle that carries several kilometres across a ravine. A fluent whistler can hold an ordinary conversation about ordinary things: come for dinner, the goat is loose, the bus has gone.

It nearly died out in the second half of the twentieth century as roads and telephones arrived. What saved it was a decision in 1999 to make silbo a compulsory subject in the island's primary and secondary schools, so that every child on La Gomera now learns it. UNESCO added it to its list of intangible cultural heritage in 2009. Several restaurants in the park and near the main road lay on demonstrations after lunch, which are touristy but genuinely impressive; if you get the chance to hear two people whistling at each other across a valley for real, stop the car.

5. Spend a day in Valle Gran Rey

Valle Gran Rey — the valley of the great king — is the island's most spectacular piece of landscape and its main holiday base. The road descends in long loops down a palm-filled gorge whose sides are terraced from the stream bed to the skyline, then arrives at a small seafront of black sand and low buildings. The scale only makes sense from the viewpoint at the top, where the terraces stack up like seating in an amphitheatre.

It has been quietly cosmopolitan since German travellers found it in the 1970s, and it retains a slightly beachcombing, drum-circle-at-sunset atmosphere alongside perfectly conventional apartments and fish restaurants. The beaches at the bottom of the valley are dark sand and shingle with strong Atlantic water; there is a sheltered swimming pool cut into the rocks for days when the sea is rough.

6. San Sebastián, and the water that crossed the Atlantic

San Sebastián de La Gomera is where the ferry docks and is worth an afternoon rather than a hurried twenty minutes. Columbus stopped here in August 1492 to take on water, wood and food before the last leg into the unknown, and returned on later voyages; the island was his final European landfall. The Columbus connection is marked all over town — the squat fifteenth-century Torre del Conde in its little park, the church where he is said to have prayed, the house on the main street now run as a small museum.

The detail that sticks is the well in the customs house courtyard, with its inscription claiming that with this water America was baptised. Whether or not the barrels came from that exact well, it is a very good line, and the courtyard is a cool, quiet place to stand and think about how small the ships were.

7. The terraces, and the honey that is not honey

Look at any hillside on this island and you are looking at hand-built stone terraces, most of them now abandoned. The work involved is difficult to take in — generations of families moving rock to make a strip of soil two metres wide on a forty-degree slope, for potatoes and vines and bananas. Our piece on the terraced hills explains how the system worked and why it is going quiet.

One crop is still very much alive, and it is the island's best souvenir. Miel de palma, palm honey, is made almost exclusively on La Gomera and involves no bees whatsoever. A guarapero climbs a Canary date palm, carefully cuts the growing crown and sets a container to catch the sap, then climbs the same tree again twice a day for months to collect and re-trim it. The sap, guarapo, is boiled down by a factor of around seven or eight to a dark, faintly smoky syrup that tastes like treacle crossed with caramel. It goes over cheese, over ice cream, over the island's almogrote, and into a glass of local rum. A tree can be tapped for years and then rested — and a good guarapero is a genuinely skilled and increasingly rare tradesman.

8. Whale watching from Playa de Santiago

The channel between La Gomera and Tenerife is one of the most reliable places in Europe to see cetaceans, because a resident population of pilot whales and bottlenose dolphins lives in the deep, sheltered water there year-round rather than passing through on migration. Sightings run at a very high rate in any settled weather.

Boats go from Playa de Santiago on the sunny southern coast and from Valle Gran Rey, and the trips from this side are smaller and quieter than the big catamarans that leave the Tenerife resorts. Choose an operator working to the regional code of conduct — distance limits, engine rules, no swimming with the animals — and read our guide to whale and dolphin watching before you book.

9. The green north

The northern valleys are the wettest and prettiest part of the island. Hermigua is a long ribbon of houses running down a banana-filled valley with an old monastery and a sea pool at the bottom; Agulo sits on a shelf of land above the sea in a near-perfect huddle of white houses; and Vallehermoso in the north-west is a working town with a rock-cut swimming area at its shore. The coast here has small dark beaches, including the walk down to Playa de la Caleta, and the round-up of the island's beaches sorts out which are safe to swim.

Making it work

Most people arrive on the ferry from Los Cristianos, which takes under an hour on the fast service and carries cars; there are also small flights from Tenerife North. If you are only here for a day, accept that you will see the caldera road, Garajonay and one valley, and nothing else — and consider whether that is really what you want from the island. Sailings, fares and the difference between the fast boat and the slow one are set out under ferries between the islands, and Viamo is useful for working out transfers at either end.

Staying over changes it completely. Three or four nights lets you walk in the forest on a cloudy morning and swim in the afternoon, and see the valleys empty of day trippers after five o'clock. A hire car is the sensible choice; the bus network is real but sparse. Where to base yourself matters more here than on bigger islands, and our comparison of the four options is worth reading before you book.

The bottom line

La Gomera is not an island of attractions, it is an island of places — and the pleasure is in moving slowly between them. Do Garajonay and Valle Gran Rey if you have one day, add San Sebastián and the boat to Los Órganos if you have three, and if you have a week, walk. The whole of the island is crossed by old stone paths that were the only roads until the 1960s, and they remain the best way to understand a place built on the vertical.