La Palma
"La Palma is the island that reminds you the Canaries are, first and last, volcanoes that haven't finished erupting."
The steepest island on earth, relative to its size, is also one of the darkest — a green volcanic spine where astronomers and banana farmers share the same slopes.
Everyone talks about Tenerife and Gran Canaria first, and I understand why — they’re bigger, louder, easier to sell. But La Palma is the one that stayed with me longest, maybe because it never stops reminding you that you’re standing on an active volcano. The island is famously the steepest landmass on the planet relative to its area: you can go from sea level to over 2,400 meters in a matter of kilometers, through five or six distinct climate zones, and the road engineering required to make that survivable is its own kind of monument.
Walking Into the Caldera
The Caldera de Taburiente sits at the island’s heart, a vast erosion crater — not, strictly, a volcanic caldera in the technical sense, though it looks every bit the part — ringed by cliffs that climb to nearly two kilometers and dressed in laurisilva, the ancient laurel forest that once blanketed the Mediterranean basin before the last ice age and now survives almost nowhere else on Earth outside these islands. I hiked partway in from the Los Brecitos trailhead, and the forest closes over you almost immediately: moss on every surface, waterfalls appearing out of cloud, the pines outside giving way to something that feels closer to a fern-age fantasy than a Spanish national park. It’s humid and cool in a way that nothing else on these dry islands prepares you for.
The Darkest Sky in Europe
La Palma’s other identity is as a capital of astronomy. The Roque de los Muchachos, at the island’s summit, hosts one of the world’s premier astronomical observatories — telescopes from a dozen countries perched above the cloud line, where the atmosphere is so still and unpolluted by light that the island has been designated a Starlight Reserve, with strict lighting ordinances protecting the darkness the way other places protect a coastline. I drove up for sunset once, past the tree line into bare volcanic rock, and watched the sea of clouds settle below the summit while the observatory domes caught the last orange light. After dark, away from the telescopes’ own restricted zone, the Milky Way was so dense and textured it looked like weather.
In September of 2021, the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the island’s southern ridge erupted for nearly three months, sending lava flows through the town of Todoque and out to the sea, adding new land to the coastline near Tazacorte even as it destroyed homes and banana plantations. Driving past the solidified black rivers of that eruption, still raw and unsoftened by vegetation, is a sobering coda to the observatory’s celestial calm — a reminder of exactly what this island is made of and still actively making.
When to go: April through June brings wildflowers and clear hiking weather in the caldera; for stargazing at Roque de los Muchachos, aim for a new-moon week between autumn and spring when the skies are driest.