The Best Things to Do in La Palma

The best things to do on La Palma are walking into the Caldera de Taburiente, driving up to the observatories on Roque de los Muchachos, hiking the volcano ridge of the Ruta de los Volcanes, wandering the balconied streets of Santa Cruz, standing at the edge of the 2021 lava field and looking up at one of the darkest night skies in Europe. It is the greenest and steepest of the Canary Islands, and almost none of it is a beach holiday.

La Palma is small — you can drive round it in a day — but vertical to an absurd degree. The island rises from the Atlantic to 2,426 metres in about fifteen kilometres, which makes it one of the steepest inhabited places on the planet relative to its size. Clouds pile against the northern and eastern slopes and keep them wet and forested; the western side is dry, terraced and covered in bananas. Everything on this list follows from that shape.

Islanders call it La Isla Bonita, and astronomers rate it among the best observing sites on earth. It has also, since 2021, carried something no other Canary Island has: a fresh volcano, and a landscape people are still rebuilding around. For the honest case for and against a week here, our piece on whether La Palma is worth visiting puts it plainly.

1. Walk into the Caldera de Taburiente

The Caldera de Taburiente is the hole at the heart of the island: an eight-kilometre bowl ringed by walls that rise two thousand metres above its floor, filled with Canary pine and drained by a single gorge. It is a national park, one of only four in the archipelago, and despite the name it is not a true volcanic caldera but an erosional one — a giant collapse scoop enlarged by water over hundreds of thousands of years.

There are two ways in. The easy one is the viewpoint at La Cumbrecita, where a short drive and a ten-minute stroll puts you on a balcony looking into the whole thing; parking there is limited and has to be reserved in advance, which catches out a great many visitors who simply drive up and are turned back. The proper one is the day walk, usually started high at Los Brecitos — most people take a shared taxi up from Los Llanos de Aridane — and finished by walking out down the Barranco de las Angustias to a waiting car. It is around fifteen kilometres, mostly downhill, and takes a comfortable six hours with stops.

On the way you pass the Cascada de Colores, a small waterfall stained ochre and rust by iron in the water, and the Roque Idafe, a rock pinnacle the island's pre-conquest Benahoarita people held sacred and fed with offerings to stop the sky falling. The full picture of the island's trail network is in our guide to walking on La Palma.

2. Drive up to Roque de los Muchachos

Roque de los Muchachos is the island's summit and the rim of the caldera, reached by a long, patient, well-surfaced mountain road. The drive alone is worth it: you climb through banana terraces, then pine forest, then out above the cloud layer into a bare, pale world of lava and lichen with the whole Atlantic below.

Along the ridge sits one of the most important collections of telescopes anywhere, run as an international observatory by more than a dozen countries. The largest of them, a single-mirror optical telescope over ten metres across, was for years the biggest of its kind in the world. The domes are extraordinary objects in their own right — white, silent and enormous against the lava. There is a visitor centre and guided tours are run, but they must be booked ahead and the telescopes themselves are working scientific instruments, not an attraction with a turnstile.

3. Look up

La Palma protects its night sky by law. A Spanish act passed in 1988 specifically to defend the quality of the island's astronomical observations regulates outdoor lighting, air traffic over the summit and even radio interference, and it has been in force long enough that the whole island is lit differently from anywhere else you will have been — amber, downward-pointing, low. In 2012 the island became the world's first certified Starlight Reserve, a designation created here and since exported.

The practical result is that you do not need to do anything clever. Drive fifteen minutes from your accommodation, turn the engine and the phone off, and give your eyes twenty minutes. The Milky Way appears as a textured band with visible dark lanes, and on a moonless night the sky is bright enough to cast a faint shadow. There are marked astronomical viewpoints around the island with orientation panels, and licensed guides run telescope evenings. Our wider guide to stargazing in the Canaries covers what to look for and when.

4. Hike the Ruta de los Volcanes

The Ruta de los Volcanes is the classic walk of the southern half of the island: a ridge path that runs along the spine of the Cumbre Vieja from the El Pilar refuge down to the far south, stepping over crater after crater, with the ocean visible on both sides at once for most of the day. It is roughly seventeen kilometres, undulating rather than brutal, and it is exposed — there is very little shade and no water once you start.

The logistics are the hard part rather than the walking. The two ends are far apart and public transport is thin, so either arrange a taxi or use one of the walkers' shuttle services that run in season. Start early: the cloud that spills over the ridge tends to arrive in the afternoon, and the whole point of the route is the view.

5. Stand at the edge of the 2021 eruption

On 19 September 2021 a fissure opened on the western flank of the Cumbre Vieja above Las Manchas and erupted for 85 days, the longest on La Palma in recorded history. The eruption buried around 1,200 hectares of the island's most productive land, destroyed a village outright, cut the coast road and built two new headlands where the lava reached the sea. Nobody died in the lava, which given what happened is remarkable.

Five years on, it is a strange and moving thing to visit. There are viewpoints above the flow at Tajuya and around the western slopes where you look over a grey-black field the size of a town, with a church spire and the odd roof standing out of it, and the new cone rising behind. Access changes as roads are rebuilt and as gas monitoring allows, and some areas — including parts of the coast around Puerto Naos — were closed for a long time because of carbon dioxide seeping from the ground. Check locally on the day rather than trusting an older guidebook, stay on marked roads and paths, and remember that people are still living with the consequences of what you have come to photograph.

6. Wander Santa Cruz de La Palma

Santa Cruz de La Palma is one of the loveliest small cities in the archipelago and takes about half a day to see properly. It was, in the sixteenth century, one of the busiest ports in the Spanish empire — third after Seville and Antwerp in the trade with the Americas, by some accounts — and the money shows in the carved doorways along its cobbled main street.

The signature sight is the Avenida Marítima: a run of tall houses whose backs face the sea, each with a wooden balcony painted a different colour, stacked along the waterfront like a row of lanterns. Elsewhere there is a squat black-stone fortress by the water, a church with a Moorish-carpentered ceiling, and — parked in a square in the middle of town, on dry land — a full-size stone replica of a caravel, now a small naval museum. It is completely daft and entirely charming.

7. The carnival that comes in a cloud of talc

If you can possibly time a visit for Carnival Monday, do. Santa Cruz celebrates Los Indianos, a parody of the islanders who sailed to Cuba in the nineteenth century and came home rich — or claimed to have. Everyone dresses in white colonial clothing, wheels battered trunks through the streets, affects a Cuban accent, and then throws several tonnes of talcum powder over everybody else. By the afternoon the old town is white to the first-floor windows and you cannot see across the square.

Those emigrations shaped the island in more lasting ways too — the money, the architecture, the cigars, the accent — and the story is told in our piece on the Indianos and Canarian emigration. The island's other great event, the Bajada de la Virgen de las Nieves, happens only every five years and includes a dance performed by men in enormous costumes that transform mid-dance into dwarfs; the next one is in 2030.

8. Salt pans, a lighthouse and the newest land in the Canaries

The southern tip of the island is its strangest corner. The Salinas de Fuencaliente are working salt pans laid out in shallow squares below two lighthouses, the water in them shading from white to pink depending on the brine, with black lava on one side and blue ocean on the other. There is a restaurant at the edge of them that serves the fish of the day with salt from the pan you are looking at.

Just inland are the volcanoes of Fuencaliente, including the cone that erupted in 1971 — until 2021, the most recent eruption on Spanish soil. That eruption also created Playa de Echentive, a black beach that simply did not exist before it. The village of Fuencaliente above is the island's wine capital, growing vines in volcanic ground much as Lanzarote does.

9. The banana coast, the black beaches and the pools

The west coast around Tazacorte is wall-to-wall banana plantation, terrace after terrace of glossy leaves under plastic netting running right down to the cliff edge. Tazacorte claims the most sunshine hours on the island and has a small museum devoted to the fruit, which is more interesting than it sounds once you learn how much of the island's economy still depends on it.

The beaches here are black and dramatic rather than golden: the harbour beach at Tazacorte is the easiest for swimming, and Playa de Nogales in the north-east is the wild one, reached down a steep path and unsafe for swimming on most days. Much of the island's bathing is done not on sand at all but in volcanic pools — the standouts being Charco Azul in the north-east and the pools at Barlovento. Our round-up of La Palma's beaches sorts the swimmable from the merely spectacular.

10. Fitting it together

Five days is the sensible minimum and a week is better. A hire car is close to essential, because the bus network is built for residents and the best places sit at the ends of long mountain roads. Allow more driving time than the distances suggest; forty kilometres here can take ninety minutes.

Base yourself in the west around Los Llanos and Tazacorte for sunshine and access to the caldera, or in Santa Cruz for the town, the ferry and the eastern side — our guide to where to stay on La Palma compares them. If you have a spare half-day in the north, the laurel forest at Los Tilos is the wettest, greenest, most ancient corner of the island, and the walk up through its water tunnels needs a head torch and a willingness to get soaked. Getting here is by ferry from Tenerife or a short inter-island flight, and the airport is a ten-minute drive from the capital.

So, what would we do with three days?

Day one: La Cumbrecita in the morning, Los Llanos and the eruption viewpoints in the afternoon, and a dark-sky stop on the way back. Day two: up to Roque de los Muchachos early, down through the north, an afternoon at Charco Azul. Day three: the Ruta de los Volcanes if you walk, or the salt pans, Fuencaliente and the southern coast if you do not, finishing with fish at the lighthouse.

That is the island in miniature: a hole in the ground, a mountain full of telescopes, a line of craters and a coast of black sand and bananas. It rewards people who like weather, walking and looking at things more than it rewards people who want a sunbed, and it is all the better for it. The wider picture of the island itself is where to start planning.