Village of 'White Caves'

Abandoned cave dwellings at 'Cuevas Blancas' in La Gomera's north-east  (Archive image)

Gomera banana in action during bonfire night

Once again there were many bonfires and parties all over La Gomera last night during 'la noche de San Juan' (St. John's Eve) to celebrate midsummer. Here in Ireland the same tradition is still alive, but the music is a bit different. The 'Gomera Banana' was in action here briefly during the Jim Dowling Uilleann Pipe and Traditional Music Festival in beautiful Glengarriff, West Cork as you can see (and hear if you click the sound on) in the above video taken at about midnight last night when the Gomera banana was shaking up fiddle player extraordinare Ross Couper. The video below was taken earlier during the festival on the pub sessions trail called 'piping for a pint'. Well more than a dozen musicians (some out of shot) got together and played until the cows came home...

Learn La Gomera's El Silbo for free

BUSUU.COM is offering free online courses to learn the whistled language unique to La Gomera and become silbador . Here's their Cannes-award winning promotional video:

Fires all over the Canary Islands tonight

One of the bonfires with fireworks in Valle Gran Rey a few
years ago, where a 'fake house' was burned as a bonfire

Programme V.G.R.

If you see fires in the Canary Islands tonight, don't be alarmed -they're bonfires as it is St. John's night, or 'la noche de San Juan' in Spanish. As is the custom in Ireland, here in the Canaries bonfires are lit, too in honour of St. John. This custom even pre-dates Christian times as it also marks the longest days of the year.
Every district, townland and village lights their own fire(s) and there are competitions for the most spectacular fires. I've seen whole houses constructed from pallets, old doors, etc., complete with old furniture and straw-stuffed 'inhabitants' being burned on St.John's night. The people party around the fires with music, food and drink and often set off fireworks. The fires nowadays are strictly controlled and have to be applied for at the local town hall. The burning of tyres, plastics, and other hazardous material is prohibited and the fires have to be within certain safety guidelines. The fiesta de San Juan continues for several days in some parishes, as is the case in Valle Gran Rey on La Gomera this year.

El Silbo - La Gomera's Unique Language

'El Silbo', also known as 'Silbo Gomero', is the ancient and still practised unique other language of La Gomera. The name is derived from the Spanish word for whistling, 'silbar', and it is a language in its own right and not simply a whistled form of Spanish. You can even whistle in almost any other spoken language using El Silbo. It probably evolved to enable communication across the island's ravine-ridden terrain during the approx. 1500 years the original  inhabitants had the island to themselves. El Silbo is not practised on any of the other Canary Islands and somewhat similar whistled communication in the rest of the world is nowhere near as refined, or long forgotten if it ever existed.

El Silbo being whistled  © informacioncanarias.com

El Silbo consists of vowels and consonants that are whistled involving a technique that uses the fingers of one hand and the tongue to produce different whistling sounds. The intonation is controlled by the tongue, and the cup of the free hand is used to modulate the sound. The resulting communication is that loud that it can travel for a couple of miles across the mountainous terrain, but it sounds amazingly pleasant to the ear even if you stand close to the whistler. Messages and gossip can thus be passed rapidly from valley to valley and right across the island, saving strenuous walks - and there's never a flat battery or a gap in reception to worry about. Mobile phones and modern roads did however lead to a decline in the use of El Silbo and a few years ago the whistling language was made a compulsory subject in the schools of La Gomera to save it from extinction. The move has proven quite popular and even the homework is done without complaint. 

Here's a link to a recent article on El Silbo in the 'BBC News Magazine', complete with video and sound samples:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20953138

and here's a short documentary with English subtitles: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJleFNqQ32M