4/3/2023 0 Comments Away from the flock![]() Most of my fellow passengers were Germans, headed for the beach community of Valle Gran Rey. I sent an e-mail message to CIT, and received confirmation by e-mail a few days later.Īnd so, on a sunny, cloudless day, a shiny new catamaran deposited me and about a hundred other passengers at the ferry dock in San Sebastian, La Gomera's biggest settlement. It seemed like a lot for only $42 a night. I chose a one-bedroom apartment in the Casa La Punta complex in the village of Hermigua (population 2,000) that was described as close to shops and markets, high on a ridge overlooking the sea and the Pico del Teide volcano on nearby Tenerife.Ĭasa La Punta also had a fully equipped kitchen, television and a washing machine. In the Web pictures, the apartments and houses appeared modest but comfortable. But I knew that in Spain, where similar lodging programs operate nationwide, rural tourist home stays are inspected and regulated by local governments. Normally I'd hesitate to book a private apartment for more than a week without first seeing it. (May, when I was visiting, is off season in the Canaries, which are busiest in the winter and during summer vacations.) There were pictures, maps and detailed descriptions of more than two dozen apartments and houses on the site, and the prices were reasonable - between $35 and $60 a night for the property, depending on the season. On the Web I found a site for a private tourist agency, CIT (Part of a network of independent agencies in the Canaries, CIT connects local homeowners with tourists seeking to stay in a village house or apartment. There was more good news: La Gomera had only one large tourist resort the rest of its tourist accommodations are a few small hotels and a network of vacation rentals. Although it is 146 square miles, less than a tenth the size of Rhode Island, La Gomera has an astonishing variety of landscapes - lush, terraced farm valleys, desert-dry coasts, and a high-altitude laurel forest covered in perpetual mists, an ecosystem so rare it has been designated a Unesco World Heritage Monument. Scanning the descriptions of the less popular Canaries, I became most interested in La Gomera, a round volcanic island 20 miles west of Tenerife. There are seven main islands in the archipelago, and the four least trafficked, according to the guidebooks, receive a fraction of the visitors of Gran Canaria, Tenerife or Lanzarote. I suspected this might be true of the Canaries and, as I planned my 10-day trip there from New York, I found evidence to support my theory. What's more, I've found that it's usually pretty easy to ditch the crowd in so-called touristy places by taking a short ride off the beaten track by car, boat or train. The Canaries, while difficult to reach from here, are an inexpensive two-and-a-half-hour hop from most major European cities, including Madrid, where I was traveling last May (I got a round-trip Madrid-Tenerife ticket on Iberia for about $160). ![]() I'm always reluctant to dismiss destinations said to be spoiled by tourism - mainly because popular destinations are usually at the other end of frequent, and cheap, airline connections. ![]() ![]() Poorly connected by air to the United States - there aren't any direct scheduled flights from here - the Canaries don't see many Americans, who have their own, more convenient versions of Tenerife in the Caribbean. The Canary Islands, which belong to Spain, have become well known as a haven for mass package tourism, thanks to the success that two of them, Tenerife and Gran Canaria, have had in attracting sun-hungry northern Europeans. I smiled, for this tourist was only passing through on her way to a place she was pretty sure would be paradise, just an hour's hydrofoil ride away. IF there is such a thing as tourist hell, it might look something like the view from my taxi as I rode from Tenerife Sur airport in the Canary Islands to the ferry dock: a wall of anonymous concrete-box condos along a beach covered with a thousand blue deck chairs, lined up like parading soldiers. ![]()
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