| Valverde - El Pinar |
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You can't fly to El Hierro directly; you can only fly here from one of the other Canary Islands. The capital of El Hierro Island is Valverde. Valverde is close both to the ferry terminal and the airport; so this will probably be the first place you will see when you come to El Hierro. You can't call Valverde overpopulated; El Hierro has only 9000 inhabitants, one third of them in Valverde. The city has a nice atmosphere, we really liked it. |
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Starting in Valverde, we did a trekking over the island. In a week we crossed it from North to South and from East to West. Indeed, El Hierro is a small island. |
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We started out with a bit of
rain. That was to be expected for two reasons: it is a green island, and that
usually means it rains sometimes. And every fourth year the statue of the
Virgen de los Reyes is
carried over the island to provoke rain, and this happened only last year. But
at our first coffee-break, the clouds broke and the sun appeared.
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| At the first village we reached, Tiñor, we wanted to have a look inside the church. Too bad, it was closed. And the window was removed, so we couldn't even have a look through the window. |
| We skip the optional detour to the sacred tree of the island, the Arból Garoé. This would have been interesting if the tree to be seen at the end of the extra kilometers would be the original legendary tree. Unfortunately, that tree has been destroyed in a storm in 1947. The tree they call the Arból Garoé today has been planted in 1957. So forget it. |
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| Around San Andrés we really started to enjoy our walk. There were lots of
animals and flowers, and the stone walls around the fields reminded us of the
Aran Islands in Ireland.
And something else reminded us of Ireland too. Yes, it started to rain agian. But we no longer cared, El Hierro is beautiful. |
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This must be King Arthur's wooden practice sword. Let's
leave it here, he might come back some day and need it. And we don't want to
piss him off.
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Really funny was our arrival at the Mirador de la Playa. A couple in a car arrived at the same time, but disappeared in just a few seconds. As the clouds were still around, there was nothing to be seen.
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