Garajonay National Park

Overview

Garajonay National Park covers 3,984 hectares of the high centre of La Gomera, and its boundary reaches into all six of the island’s municipalities: Vallehermoso, Hermigua, Valle Gran Rey, San Sebastián de La Gomera, Alajeró and Agulo. The forest is why it was protected. Laurisilva, the evergreen laurel woodland that covers the plateau, is a survivor of the flora that grew around the Mediterranean in the Tertiary before climate shifts erased it from the continents, and the park holds more than half of the mature laurel forest left in the Canary Islands.

The high point is the Alto de Garajonay at 1,487 m, which is also the highest ground on the island. Everything below drains outward through steep barrancos, so the park works less like a block of land than a lid over the middle of the island.

What you actually experience is weather. The trade winds push cloud against the northern slopes, the forest combs water out of it, and the ground stays wet. Annual rainfall passes 800 mm, and on many days you walk inside the cloud rather than under it, with moss on the trunks and water dripping off the canopy long after any rain has stopped.

Access costs nothing. There is no gate, no ticket and no timed entry, and both staffed centres are free to walk into. The park’s own answer to what you should do here is to walk: 18 numbered routes run from a 20-minute stroll to a six-and-a-half-hour circuit, and almost all of them start from a car park or a bus stop on the main road.

Visiting

Two staffed places anchor a visit. The Juego de Bolas visitor centre at La Palmita, in the municipality of Agulo on the northern side, opens Monday to Sunday from 09:30 to 16:30 and closes only on 25 December and 1 January; the information number is 922 477 222. Inside are a permanent exhibition on Macaronesia and the park, the Casa de la Memoria on rural island life, gardens of native plants, and walkways out to viewpoints. The smaller La Laguna Grande information centre sits in the middle of the park on the GM-2 at km 26.5 and opens earlier, 08:30 to 16:30 daily, with glass walls that make it a decent bird hide while you ask about trail closures. Entry to both is free.

The walking network is numbered 1 to 18 and published with distance, duration and difficulty, so you can plan without guessing. Route 7, Contadero to the Alto de Garajonay and back, is 2.5 km and about an hour at low difficulty, which makes the island’s summit an easy target rather than an expedition. Route 3, La Laguna Grande I, is a 0.9 km circle of 30 minutes for anyone with small children in tow. At the other end, Route 18, the Gran Circular from Pajarito through El Cedro and Tajaqué, is 12.7 km, six and a half hours and graded high.

Sixteen signposted miradores line the main roads, and they are the fallback when the forest is closed in. The Mirador de Agando gives the cleanest view of the Roque de Agando; the Mirador del Lomo del Dinero looks across the laurel canopy covering the northern summits; the Mirador de Igualero faces the Fortaleza de Chipude and holds the monument to the Silbo Gomero whistled language. From the Alto de Garajonay itself, clear days show El Hierro, La Palma, Tenerife and, occasionally, Gran Canaria. Sunrise from the summit puts the sun up behind Teide.

For sitting down, La Laguna Grande is the main recreation area and the only one with real facilities: tables, car park, water fountains, a children’s playground, toilets and a restaurant, plus the information centre and two short waymarked walks. Three smaller rest spots handle the overflow: Los Chorros de Epina on the north-west edge, with a spring running through seven heather-wood spouts; the Ermita de Lourdes beside the El Cedro stream, with tables and a drinking-water tap; and Las Creces, which has benches and interpretation panels.

The rules are worth reading before you arrive, because several of them catch people out. Bicycles are allowed on the roads and most forestry tracks but not on the footpaths. Dogs are allowed on the trails on a lead. Sleeping inside the park is not permitted at all. Swimming in the forest streams is banned, drones and any other airborne kit are out, and climbing the roques needs written permission from the park directorate. Sections of path are surfaced for wheelchairs, and joëlettes are allowed across the network if you ask the park first.

Guided walks run for general visitors and for organised groups, and school parties get a free programme of routes and activities. Both are booked through the central reservations site or by calling the park offices in San Sebastián de La Gomera on 922 922 600.

History

People reached La Gomera from North Africa around the first century, and the archaeological record shows they used the summit forest hard: firewood, pasture, water, timber for bowls, spears and combs, and berries, medicinal herbs and fern rhizomes for food. The high ground was also sacred. Garajonay is the only Spanish national park with an archaeological site on its highest summit: the Alto de Garajonay carries a cluster of sacrificial stone altars where the inedible parts of goats and sheep were burned as offerings, and worked stones have been found on ground as awkward as the top of the Roque Agando.

The forest survived the conquest better than its equivalents on other islands, and the reason is unromantic. Sugar mills from the late fifteenth century burned enormous quantities of firewood, and La Gomera even exported wood to the mills of Gran Canaria, but from the mid fifteenth century until the first third of the nineteenth the island sat under a seigneurial regime in which the counts of La Gomera owned the land and the water and imposed tight rules on cutting. That restriction spared the woods a collapse that happened elsewhere.

Pressure fell away from the 1960s, when bottled butane replaced firewood, emigration to Venezuela and Tenerife emptied villages, and farming declined. The replacement threat was official: large pine plantations in the mid 1960s and early 1970s, including hundreds of hectares in what is now the southern part of the park, wiped out native vegetation across those areas. That damage is what pushed scientists including the Swedish botanist Eric Sventenius and the brothers Buenaventura and Telesforo Bravo to argue for protecting the Gomeran summits.

Protection arrived on 25 March 1981, when the Cortes Generales, Spain’s parliament, declared the forest a national park, with the first governing board seated the same year. On 25 November 1986 Garajonay became the first Spanish natural site inscribed by UNESCO as World Heritage. The boundaries were revised on 30 December 2003, and since 1 January 2010 the park has been run entirely by the Canary Islands government rather than the Spanish state.

Fire runs through the recent history. Twenty people died in the 1984 fire at Los Roques, the deadliest forest fire in Spain, and a monument and a mirador mark the spot. In August 2012 fire burned through roughly a fifth of the park, 747 hectares. You can see the aftermath from the Mirador de El Mocanillo, which looks over the burned southern sector.

Getting there

Nothing lands or docks at the park itself, so the trip has two legs: reach La Gomera, then climb. Most people come by ferry from Tenerife. The crossing from Los Cristianos to San Sebastián de La Gomera takes about 50 minutes with Fred Olsen, which is short enough to make a day trip work and long enough that you should book a car space in advance in summer. San Sebastián also has a marina if you are arriving under your own sail.

Flying is the other option and mostly a local one. La Gomera airport (GMZ) sits near Playa de Santiago on the drier southern coast, deliberately placed away from the cloudier north and from the park, and Binter Canarias runs the services to Tenerife North and Gran Canaria. It is 34 km southwest of San Sebastián de La Gomera by road.

By road

The GM-2 links San Sebastián with Valle Gran Rey and crosses the park from east to west. It is the main way in, the road most trailheads and viewpoints hang off, and you can reach the park by road from all six municipalities. Expect switchbacks and slow averages, because the roads follow the ridges between the ravines.

By bus

Guaguagomera is the island’s public bus service, and several lines cross or skirt the park on their way between villages: line 1 between San Sebastián de La Gomera and Valle Gran Rey, line 8 between Vallehermoso and Valle Gran Rey, and line 6 between Valle Gran Rey and the airport. The stops inside or beside the national park are Los Roques, Cruce de Pajarito, Las Paredes, Las Hayas, Las Creces, Apartacaminos and Epina. The park’s own advice is to check both outward and return timetables before committing to a walk, a polite way of saying the return options are thin.

Taxis are the gap-filler, and the park lists local ranks by town: San Sebastián de La Gomera on 922 870 524, Vallehermoso on 922 108 159, Hermigua on 922 880 047, Agulo on 922 801 074, Valle Gran Rey on 922 805 058, Chipude on 646 569 617, and the airport and Playa de Santiago on 922 895 022. Electric and plug-in hybrid drivers have charging points spread around the island, including one at the La Laguna Grande recreation area inside the park.

Tips

• Look at the park’s incidents page the morning you go. Trails, tracks, recreation areas and viewpoints can all be shut for weather alerts, fire risk or conservation work, and the closures are published rather than signposted at the road end.

• Dress for the cloud, not for the coast. The summit is at 1,487 m and the forest holds moisture even when the ports are in full sun, so the park’s standing advice is comfortable footwear plus warm clothing.

• Pick a route by its published number. Every one of the 18 comes with distance, duration and a difficulty grade, so you can match a walk to the time you actually have instead of guessing from a signpost.

• Start at La Laguna Grande if you arrive early. Its information centre opens at 08:30, an hour before Juego de Bolas, and it is inside the park rather than on the northern edge.

• Do not count on a barbecue. The cooking hearths at La Laguna Grande close for the fire season, which recently ran from 5 June to 1 October, while the recreation area, the toilets, the restaurant and Routes 3 and 6 stayed open.

• Book the Las Mimbreras parking slot if you are driving there in high summer. From 10 July to 20 September a per-vehicle reservation is required between 09:30 and 17:00; walkers are exempt.

• Leave the bike at the road. Cycling is fine on roads and most tracks and banned on the footpaths, and the park is blunt about why: it wrecks the paths and endangers walkers.

• Plan to sleep off the mountain. Overnighting inside the park is not allowed, so the walk has to fit into a day out from wherever you are based.

• Combine the summit with a museum stop. The park points visitors to the MAG, the Museo Arqueológico de La Gomera in San Sebastián de La Gomera, for the culture behind the summit altars.

• Ask about a guided walk rather than assuming you need one. The park runs small-group guided routes, bookable through the central reservations system or on 922 922 600, and the self-guided posts on several routes cover much of the same ground.