Campers evicted in Valle Gran Rey

                                                                                                                                                                                    

About 20 persons found camping ''illegally'' along Valle Gran Rey's coastline in the south-west of La Gomera were evicted by police from their hide-aways early yesterday. The eviction was filmed by Canarian TV (see video above). These evictions happen once or twice a year, supposedly to protect the environment, and can cause great hardship for those evicted, as some of them are homeless and most cannot afford to rent accommodation. An added excuse for the latest eviction was the pandemic and the mass of restrictions. 

It must be said that all of these people called 'hippies' by the authorities are harmless and usually keep their surroundings very clean and tidy, often even collecting litter left by 'normal' tourists and locals.

Below I'm quoting an article written by former La Gomera resident Damien Enright for the Irish Examiner some time ago in which he explains the island's hippie culture:

''...Pressed shorts or crisp new holiday gear may look seriously out-of-place in Valle Gran Rey. A battered straw hat, faded levis, a washed-out T-shirt and well worn sandals is better suited.

Thus accoutered, one may even meld with the long-term foreigners with their battered cars, and join the local culture where ‘making a million’ comes second place to living a hassle-free life, and sartorial elegance is strictly for ‘occasions’.

The first foreigners to show up in latter day Gomera were dubbed ‘beatniks’, but were actually ‘peaceniks’, American draft-dodgers fleeing the governmental diktat that they were obliged to go killing people in a far away country called Vietnam.

By 1970, a colony of 20 of so had somehow drifted in and set up camp at the Playa Ingles, a beach still as wild and unspoiled today as it was then.

The locals had no objection. As a friend of mine Barbara Belt wrote in Living Tenerife magazine “Cities like Paris, London and Stockholm offered them shelter. So, surprisingly, did an isolated valley in La Gomera.

In the late sixties, Valle Gran Rey was about as far away from modern Europe as you could get.

There was no blacktop road. In bad weather, even walking in the valley was tricky. The only ferry left from the other side of the island and then took all day to reach Tenerife. No-one had mains electricity.

Telephones were a rarity (as were the state police, the Guardia Civil). It was the perfect spot to hole up and wait for the world to change.”

This group expanded. Girlfriends arrived. Barbara continues the history “The parties were famous; the foreign girls spectacularly uncovered and uninhibited and the boys “hairy like Robinson Crusoe”.

The beach became a magnet for the young people from the village. Interestingly, there was no parental paranoia, no warnings to keep away. These – the first foreigners to come and stay – were seen as ‘buena gente’ (good people ).

They were gentle, friendly and well-mannered, and were welcomed. Valle Gran Rey, to its credit, was an open-minded community, blissfully free of sensationalist (or indeed any!) press or TV.

Locals contributed to their welfare, bringing fish for baking in their rock oven, potatoes for the pot, avocadoes and papayas. They shopped for non-local essentials at the tiny local shop.”

The idyll drew to an end at about the same time as the war they’d wanted no part in. By 1975, only a few of the original group were still here.

These drifted home one by one, leaving their valley to be discovered by other young travellers who’d heard of ‘the Gomera scene.’

The Gomeros remember los americanos with great affection. Strange to think that they were treated with more tolerance here, in a distant outpost of Franco’s dictatorship, than in their own country...''

''...Gomera’s association with alternative lifestyles is still here, and attracts holidaymakers wanting to avoid the brash commercialism and big resorts.

The ‘alternatives’, now dubbed ‘hippies’, lead separate lives, but their sunset drumming and fire shows draw ‘straight’ visitors in their dozens to join the exotic milieu. At the Sunday craft market, they display their wares.

Many are skilled jewellers, potters and artists.

The local authorities, however, face a dilemma. Recently, they licensed a remote beach for an international Rainbow Gathering of people who annually congregate somewhere on earth to celebrate a month of peace, harmony, freedom and respect.

However, after it ended, stragglers wandered to Valle Gran Rey, bathed and washed their clothes at the beach showers, and strolled the town naked, waiting for them to dry.

Not a good image, the authorities decided, and turned off the water. The eye-catching unclothed soon drifted away, and showers are, again, today, restored. But how to reconcile hippy ambience and vacationers’ expectations?

There’s the rub...''        (Damien Enright February 2018)

Fishy tales from La Gomera

Beaked whale stranded in Charco del Conde, Valle Gran Rey (Image: Ayuntamiento Valle Gran Rey)

While we're roasting in Gomera-like summer heat here in the west of Ireland, Damien Enright (himself 'stranded' in La Gomera due to Corona curtailments) reported from the island in the Irish Examiner yesterday:

'' Damien Enright: Merciless predation on the beaches of Gomera

Gomera is always replete with stories to tell, and this week is no exception. For me, it began in serendipitous accord with my recent theme of “small is beautiful” when I found myself waist-high in the sea surrounded by small, lifeless fish floating laterally, not belly up, glittering like spangles on the surface.

I picked one up, then two. They were as fresh as if in life, unusual and elegant. I laid two across my open palm, one pink, one metallic blue, each with a nose one third of its body length. Snipe trumpet fish, they are called, ‘trompeteros’. So long is the appendage that snipe trombone fish might suit them better. I took photos. I’d display them but the space is better filled by the image of a second item of deep-water fauna that beached here, so I will just tell the trumpet fish story.

They live at depths in tropical and sub-tropical waters in sea mounts at depths to 600m. They come to the surface at night to feed on crustacean zooplankton and return at dawn. Wouldn’t it take them half the night just to arrive? No, because, in shoals, they ride currents like geyser spouts rising from the submarine canyons. Tragically, however, they sometimes cannot find gaps in the ‘geysers’ and, not strong enough to swim against them, cannot make the return journey to the cool, dark depths that are their home.

Stranded on the surface under the heat of the sun, they die in their millions, are a feast for gulls, wash up in swathes on island beaches, forming heaps half the height of haystacks until buried rather than left stinking in the sun.

Snipe trumpet fish close up (Damien Enright)

A tragic sight, but not so sad as the solitary creature lying on broken rocks at the mouth of ‘the baby beach’ as it is called, a shallow pool with a fringe of black sand and perfect for children’s bathing.

I watched it as it was washed in, a dead cuvier’s beaked whale, the tide carrying it relentlessly onto the rocks where it lay as the sea pulled back. Later, the beach was cordoned off until yesterday when a big boat got in at high tide to harpoon it and tow it to the pier where a JCB lifted it onto a truck to be taken away for burial.

Cuvier’s beaked whales are toothed whales that can dive deeper (to over 1km) and stay underwater longer (20 to 40 minutes) than any other mammal. Incredibly, studies have recorded them at depths of 3km, staying 138 minutes without coming up for air. The ‘beak’ enables them to suck in their prey, often of giant squid or octopus. The jaw makes them appear to be smiling. Mature adults average 6m in length. The whale on the rocks was about 4m, a rough estimate when my son scrambled over the rocks and stood alongside it to take a picture.

What fate brought this fine creature to its untimely demise? As we know, the laws of nature are unforgiving, and not always fair. It is not always for food that predators kill, but for sport.

We have seen Attenborough television footage of orcas tossing live seals into the air like netballs players throw a ball. Orcas or sharks may have killed this animal not for food but for fun. The flesh of the tail had been stripped away leaving a metre of bare white vertebrae, as thick as your arm.

Without the tail to drive its plunge, the animal couldn’t dive to its native depths and evade the killers.

The many wounds on its body may have been sustained in battles with other males, shark bites and rock tears as it washed ashore; blood was in pools around it, blood which, until earlier, poured into the sea.

The scent and sight of blood naturally attracts even more predators. It was sad to see this unique, apparently healthy, animal lying dead on the sharp black rocks fringing the beach of black sand.

Presently, there is the annual run of bluefin tuna between the islands of La Gomera and El Hierro, and sharks, orcas and local artisan-owned fishing boats gather to harvest the bounty.

Fishing boats can take a quota of 500kg per year. One of my son’s friends comes from a Hierro fishing family. Last year, his father’s quota was filled by just two bluefin one of almost 300kg, the other of 190kg.

What happens if a boat hooks a bluefin that weighs over half a ton (if any exist still) half the size of the boat and almost as powerful as its engines. How can they let it go? I don’t know. Life’s a learning process.

I’m curious to find out.'' (Damien Enright, Irish Examiner)

Praise for La Gomera's genuine laid-back atmosphere

The following is an excerpt from an article by Damien Enright, who like me will spend the spring and summer at home in Ireland. It appeared in the Irish Examiner last Monday and eloquently describes the type of atmosphere La Gomera calls its own:

''A king’s ‘ramson’ wouldn’t keep me from West Cork

IT’S goodbye to La Gomera and the canaries, their bubbling morning song from the fruit trees when we stayed in a friend’s house in the mountains, and from our neighbour Gerardo’s spacious aviary when we dwelt in the valley, writes Damien Enright.

A wild canary taking the evening sun on a tree in La Gomera, Canary Islands. Picture: Damien Enright

...  As you read this, we will be journeying home. We’ve greatly enjoyed the walking, swimming, meeting old friends and the food in La Gomera. Holidaymakers who visit the island always say what they most love is that it is so laid-back.

‘Laid-back’ is, of course, a 1960s hippy-term, now used by upright citizens who never actually got laid-back, back then. Why do they find La Gomera so easy-going? Well, they’re no hurry, not much traffic, no bustle, no hustlers, no crime, no aggravation. There are no garish tourist shops or waiters waving one into restaurants, girls in high-heeled cowboy-boots and short shorts handing out time-share leaflets, or signboards for monkey parks, excursions, whale-watching boats or dolphin aquariums blocking the pavements.

‘Laid-back’ has become a high saleable quality for many stressed-out city dwellers. There are, we know, hundreds of sun-blessed Caribbean, South American, and Asian beaches where commercial action is unknown: but holidaymakers ask themselves if they can relax in places where there are no other foreign footprints on the sand. These days, the locals may no longer be happy with just “livin’ on coconuts and fishes from de sea”.

A big plus for Gomera’s laid-back feeling is that there is no crime. Women can safely walk alone on remote trails. They can go out at night to a restaurant or bar with no fear of being approached, much less accosted, by intrusive locals or other holidaymakers. It is to be admitted that there isn’t a lot of after-dark action. There are no nightclubs or discos — not the place to take your teenage kids on holiday! — but two bars stay open late. Small groups of local and international musicians play impromptu sessions in others.

Most visitors are ‘into’ the island, its natural charms. Many are walkers, and German. German walkers eat dinner early, are asleep by 11pm and up at dawn to set off, a Nordic walking stick in each hand, rucksack on back, valderee-valderah. Then, there’s the ambience. There are no amusement parlours, McDonald’s or Starbucks.

Only one hotel is owned by multinational operators, The Tecina in Playa Santiago, a sort of luxury mini-Tenerife resort owned by Fred Olsen international. Elsewhere, towns have small, family-owned hotels or pensions. In Valle Gran Rey, the handful of hotels are small, low-rise and locally owned, with one or two four-star establishments.

Laid-back may also be a result of local families owning most businesses, being comfortably off, and living traditionally. At least a dozen Germans, long-term residents, have set up successful activity or amenity enterprises, which ‘fit in’.

Local families build their low-rise, small apartment blocks or rented accommodation units themselves; there’s always a builder in the family. The restaurants are largely locally owned, staffed by sons and daughters, with fresh fish and succulent sun-infused vegetables supplied by family members; there’s always a farmer or fishermen in the family.

So, the money is kept at home. The land is locally owned, not sold to conglomerates. The profits are not shipped out. The locals are not just waiters. They have a stake, and the island’s ambience, morality and laid-back way of life is theirs.

The same can be said of tourist villages in Ireland. Tourists say what they like best in Ireland is the atmosphere and the people. Our village in West Cork is a lot like Gomera, but for the weather. However, it will be spring — and we have to go home anyway, because we’ve run out of Barry’s Tea.''

Hope confirmed

Below I'm posting another article by Damien Enright which appeared in the Irish Examiner last June and which I had intended but forgotten to reproduce here. Having experienced the inferno in the summer of 2012 here myself it still still amazes me how resilient nature and humans can be:

''La Gomera’s lush green valleys have risen from the ashes

TO SEE green shoots rise from blackened branches in the vast swathes of forest destroyed by wildfires in La Gomera in the Canary Islands in August 2012 was at once a joy and a reassurance. 

The fires had made world news. Doomsayers had predicted that 30% of the ancient woodland that had once blanketed the islands and the Mediterranean shores was gone forever. La Gomera, a World Heritage Site, was its last redoubt.

But our hopes in the resilience of nature were slowly coming to pass. The giant heathers and laurels that grow 15m tall in the cloud-forests of the central plateau had not been irrevocably damaged, even by the salt water which the fire-fighter planes had to use when supplies of fresh water were exhausted and villages were imperilled.

To our joy, treetop-high clumps of wispy heather and shining wax laurel here and there interrupted the view between us and the charnel-house hills, cemeteries not of bones but of skeletal trees, all the more poignant for the secondary growth of wildflowers beneath them and the China-blue sky above.

I’m not sure that the overseas wedding guests that joined us on an expedition to the National Park two days after my son’s La Gomera nuptials fully followed my excited babbling, so entranced were they with the pathways of light and shade, the lichened trees, the ferns, the flowers, the exotic butterflies, the silence and green beauty of the seventy per cent of woodland that remained in good health and heart, untouched by the fire, uncultivated by man, an ecology that is its unique own.

The roof of the island is a long- extinct, forested volcano called for a pair of legendary lovers, Gara and Jonay, pre-Spanish Guanche people, mountain Berbers from North Africa who settled the islands, leaving many legends but little history.

Garajonay is a romantic place. It was there that my son and his ‘novia’, a lovely girl from Bedfordshire, made their marriage bond.

That they should wed on the island, at a small, white chapel perched on a terrace on the slopes opposite the tiny hamlet which was always been our family’s Gomera home, was an inspired decision. The stone-laid paths the guests would walk to reach it passed beneath tall palm trees, past flower-laden walls, under mango and guava trees, past papayas and passion fruit shining in sunlight, to the 109 stone steps, which they, the guests, all tricked out in wedding finery, climbed with no difficulty at all.

The ceremony took place inside the chapel decked with flowers by the village women and celebrated by a shy but smiling priest just a little older than bride and groom. After the ceremony, the readings, the signings and witnessings — and the fine singing of ‘She Walks through the Fair’ by Kate Finn, accompanied on guitar by groomsman, Richard Milner, both of west Cork — the congregation trooped out into the sun, warm but not blinding at seven in the evening.

There, on the high terrace, Irish, English, Czech, German, Spanish and Gomero, we swanned about and drank bubbly cava under the shade of a spreading tree, or posed for photos against the backdrop of the hills, the sea, and the first hints of sunset spreading over the ocean where the valley opened below us to the west.

Needless to say, the women and girls were all stunningly beautiful in the sunlight, suntans and diaphanous dresses, and the men paragons of elegance, dressed for the day and the job.

I leant on the churchyard wall and looked down at the valley floor. How green it was, how fecund, fruit orchards and market gardens. And how glorious were the stately Canarian palms, their heads tousled by a light breeze, their leaves glistening in the sun.

Sad, had been the sight when we drove over the escarpment the year after the great fire, and looked down from 3,000ft onto a cemetery of scorched earth and black trunks, the landscape of a nuclear holocaust. Emblems of the Canary islands, pride of the Valle Gran Rey, they stood stripped and leafless, like tall, burnt gravestones marking where the fires had passed.

But last week, coming down into the valley after six months away, no such devastation greeted us. The valley seemed as it had always been.

Now, from the church, I noticed neat, chain-saw cut slices of palmera trunk on the valley floor. The dead had been downed, but so numerous were the survivors that the fallen were not missed.

If, after looking down on the valley for 34 years, I didn’t notice the absence, visitors surely wouldn’t. Valley Gran Rey had lost none of its magic; it is still one of the loveliest places I have ever been.''      Damien Enright

La Gomera - not so far from the Sahara

Damien Enright, a former resident and connoiseur of La Gomera, reported the following in the Irish Examiner just before Christmas:

'' Robed figure resembled character from nativity scene

All that was missing was the camel. The half-lit scene of the large man wearing full Palestinian-style head-dress and robes standing by a stable beside a remote road in La Gomera, Canary Islands, the clear cobalt sky and a single star behind him, could have been a tableau for a Christmas night at Bethlehem, and the man one of the three kings.

He certainly looked authentic, a real Arab. The stable, supported by rough-hewn posts and roofed with broken terracotta tiles, could have been a stable 2000 years ago.

As my pal and I drove past, I wondered what a man in full Arab dress was doing in in the proverbial middle-of-nowhere, on this island that where there are almost no Arab immigrants whatsoever, and whose last north African visitation was the Mountain Berbers, the Guanches, who arrived on the islands, then unpopulated, around the 10th century.

The sudden glow of a cigarette tip convinced me that he was a local, probably having a quiet smoke before heading off to take part in some fiesta or other. He’s not an Arab, I said to my pal as we drove past. Oh yes, said my pal, he most certainly is. He’s from what was once Spanish Sahara. He and two dozen others are here to work in the banana plantations at La Dama.

They have little contact with the Gomero people, except at work. Almost all are single men, but there are three or four families — lucky for La Dama, because their children keep the local primary school open; otherwise the village would no longer have sufficient children to warrant a school. The area of Spanish Sahara, bounded by the Atlantic ocean to the west and the ocean of sand stretching from the Mauritanian border to the Red Sea to the east, was 266,000sq km. Ireland is 84,400sq km.

Its population, Desert Berbers called Sahrawis, wandered the oases of the vast territory, trading in camels, or lived in coastal villages, where they fished. They were uneasy with Spanish colonial rule, which lasted from 1884 to 1975, when Spain ceased to govern at the behest of the UN de-colonisation initiative. It was the last of Spain’s extensive colonies, which once stretched from the Americas to the Philippines.

I recall, when I lived in Ibiza in the early 1960s, the locals complaining that their sons were posted to Spanish Sahara’s dusty, no-horse town of Al Aaiún for their two-year compulsory military service while young men from the neighbouring island Majorca got postings on mainland Spain. Ibiza had been on the anti-Franco Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, and was still suffering for its allegiance.

When Spain gave up its colony, Morocco and Mauritania laid claim.

Meanwhile, a Sahrawi guerilla force known as Polisario attempted to create an independent state. They blocked Mauritanian occupation, but were defeated by Morocco in the Western Sahara War in 1975. The Moroccans built a berm, a sand wall running the length of what is now the western border of The Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (Polisario). It is economically useless and heavily mined, The Sahrawis fled to Algeria where 150,000 have lived in camps at Tindouf, and 25,000 in Mauritania, longer than almost any other refugees worldwide. The camps are largely self-governing.

Polisario’s socialist policy heavily emphasises modernisation through education, the emancipation of women and suppression of tribalism. Sahrawi women played a major part in pre-refugee life and now in camp administration. Western Sahara remains a disputed territory where the UN recognises neither Moroccan nor Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic sovereignty.

It is strangely apt that Berbers should find work in the Canary Islands where the pre-Spanish, indigenous settlers were Berber Guanches — and, especially, that they should come to La Gomera where Guanche DNA is found in 60% of the local people, double or triple that of the other islands.

The Guanches maintained no contact with home. Local names, however, and surviving phrases of their obsolete language reveal the connection; there is, for example, a town called Gomera in Libya. Once a Berber town, it might since have become Arabic and Muslim.

The Guanches were not Muslims; they worshipped gods of sun, moon and rain. Possibly they fled to the islands before the onslaught of Islam spreading across north Africa in the 6th and 7th centuries. They fell off the world’s edge and found paradise....'' (Damien Enright, Irish Examiner)

Red bananas

Bananas (Dwarf Cavendish)growing in Valle Gran Rey, La Gomera's south-west

It is amazes me every winter when I'm here on La Gomera how many regular visitors and people, who like me have lived here for longer spells of time, I meet in one of the small local bars. Maybe not surprisingly there's also a strong connection with regulars from the southwest of Ireland where rural life is somewhat similar. Yesterday I met writer Damien Enright once again, a man who discovered La Gomera long before I did, and was reminded of the regular Monday column he writes for the Irish Examiner. As we can't get any Irish newspapers here on La Gomera, I am posting todays article by Damien below:

Tenerife farmers smitten by the lure of red bananas

Monday, October 26, 2015

Red bananas. Waiting in the south Tenerife port of Los Cristianos for the ferry to the smaller island of La Gomera, I read in a local newspaper that a Tenerife farmer had successfully grown red bananas and they would soon be cultivated in the Canaries.

Bananas don’t come only in yellow, and are not always the variety popular in banana splits.

Your correspondent knows a thing or two about bananas, having lived among them for long or short periods over three decades, and having once upon a time owned his very own banana plantation, with all of 27 plants in production.

I did not cultivate them himself; the produce of 27 plants wouldn’t have made the game worth the candle. Also, even then 30 years ago, the thought of hefting up 50kg ‘piñas’ (pineapple-shaped bunches) up 30m of terraces would make the deepest suntan pale. I donated the plot to neighbours; they worked it, and reaped the rewards. Meanwhile, I sat on the balcony of my renovated Canarian bothán, smoking a cheroot in a style suitable to a plantation owner.

Most of my knowledge of bananas comes second-hand, from evening-time conversations sitting on a stone wall with a complaining farmer, my neighbour and friend. He constantly found the prices too low, the government too greedy and the rains falling on the forests above the valley inadequate. He once conveyed to me the astounding fact that 1kg of bananas requires 400 litres of water to reach harvesting.

He is now retired. We mulled over the red banana idea together. Unquestionably, as they went through the various stages of green to yellow, to orange to vivid red, they would be eye-catching on the greengrocer’s display. Fried or roasted, rather than eaten ‘raw’, they also produce more ‘hijos’ (sons) from the fruit-bearing plant, thus stock multiplies more rapidly.

I’ve seen red banana chips in Cuba and Jamaica, sold in plastic bags at bus stops, and filling stations, and I’ve eaten them in Mexico. They were tasty but savoury, nothing like the sweet bananas we know. Perhaps red banana chips will become popular in Europe and compete with potato crisps in the pub. Plantains, like much bigger, green versions of the yellow, Canarian Cavendish banana are a major element in Caribbean and African diets.

The original Cavendish fruit was called for Sir William, the sixth duke of Devonshire. It was cultivated by his gardeners and dispersed to tropical regions in the 1850s. However, many authorities think bananas first reached the Canaries in the 15th century from Africa, having come there from Asia.

Thomas Fyffe, with headquarters in Dublin, started importing Canarian bananas to the British Isles in 1888. In a joint venture with Chiquita Bananas in 2014, Fyffes became the largest importer of bananas in the world; however, this union was terminated later that year.

Fyffes, an Irish company, is still very much in business, employing 5,000 workers worldwide. Canary Island bananas are famous for their intensity of flavour. Smaller than Latin American imports, they receive less water, and more sun. Like Canarian tomatoes, they are sweeter than those grown in equatorial regions or under glass. Now enjoying an exclusive brand name, ‘plátano de Canarias’, they are marketed as premium fruit. For the EU, the distance between plantation and market is shorter than from tropical producers. The carbon footprint is smaller, and the fruit retains a higher degree of moisture and a juicier flavour.

We have enjoyed our acclimatisation here; the weather has been like a continuation of our Irish non-summer, only warmer. The local people love it. “¡Muy fresco!” they say gleefully — with an inverted exclamation mark —while it rains buckets and the asphalt on the roads cracks and red earth is washed out, to look like blood veins when it dries. The weather suits us. The sun will come, whatever.

As a bonus, migrant birds are blown in by the storms — while the sand on the main valley beach is entirely swept away, exposing hard, rounded stones.

On a sheltered strand, where the small number of visitors gathered to grab snatches of sun, a migrant whimbrel descended, along with a common sandpiper. The whimbrel walked daintily between sunbathers, quite unafraid; I have never seen the like. At home, whimbrels always stay a safe distance out on the slob.

I could only surmise that it was this year’s bird, born on a remote Arctic moorland, and had never seen humans before. It was heading for Africa. The tail-end of Hurricane Joaquin had blown it in.

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