Exploring Las Palmas and Gran Canaria

Or, how to fill a week before all hell breaks loose.

We spent the afternoon after we arrived from Gibraltar exploring Vegueta, the old town in Las Palmas, which is home to several museums, a cathedral, a large, very vibrant food market, and charming restaurants and cobbled streets. To get there from the marina we walked along a commercial street complete with supermarkets, hair salons, take out shops, and office buildings, all closed (Sundays in Spain), until the street became a pedestrian mall. Then there were a lot more people, more open shops, and a strong pull to Vegueta, ahead, just out of sight.

It was very pleasant then to walk almost alone through the winding streets of the old town, discovering small delights and images. Again, little was open beyond a few restaurants and later, as we were enjoying a late lunch under a leafy canopy, we watched neighboring restaurants close their doors for a few hours’ siesta. It sounded soooo appealing. Once back to the boat, the sun setting through the cracks in our blinds, I crawled into bed again and slept for 16 hours.

Our anchorage was a relatively long dinghy ride from the marina’s dinghy dock, and after going to and fro a few times and, especially after spending another relatively rolly, unprotected night, we decided it was time to move into the marina. They had room for us in a separate section called La Vela Latina, one used mostly for smaller local boats, but with room for a few cats to tie up alongside. (Vela Latina, or Lateen boats, the traditional fishing boats in the Canaries, are worthy of a blog of their own. Someday I may get to it.) The ARC+, the smaller rally that goes to Grenada, not St. Lucia, with a 5 day stop in Cabo Verde, hadn’t left yet, so the rest of the marina was still full of frantic crew. (I recognized that species a couple of weeks later, when we became frantic, too.)

We moved in that morning, then took a bus to the central “guagua” (bus) station and walked along the busy streets to the apex of the beach that borders the other side of the peninsula. Filled with sunbathers and crashing waves, it was wide and pretty, very clean, and huge. Several kilometers huge. Immediately apparent was that at least in the sections we walked through, there was almost none of the schlocky tourist crap served up next to beaches everywhere we’d been in the Med, from the Ionian to the Dodecanese to Sicily and even (gasp!) Porto Pollenҫa. Instead, there were a few boutiques, and lots and lots of food. Restaurants of all varieties, gelato, and candy stores, and anything else you might want to eat. Which was just as well: we were starving, and we sat down under a straw umbrella at the edge of the beach and ordered.

One last lunch with Nelson, then back to the boat and farewells as he headed home to Pollenҫa. He’d been great crew, huge fun and good humored, an amazing cook, and calm presence. It was hard to see him go – we all wanted him to stay and continue on to St. Lucia with us, but wee James and Maddie needed him, and Jessica, already beatified in our view, was ready for him to come home and make their family whole again.

We put our bikes together the next morning, and then Las Palmas really opened up. The bike lanes throughout the city streets are surpassed only by the lanes that stretch from one end of this large city to the other – at least 5 km in either direction from the marina. They are part of a wide walkway that hugs the coast to the south, and the beach to the north, then cuts into town and past the central guagua station before following the beach out along the northern coast of the island. Bikes are always a game changer: simple errands become easier if they don’t require a long walk to carry out. Exploration becomes even more attractive than it already was. We did more of both.

I first rode to the south, right out to the suburb where the lanes lead to a cobbled waterfront walkway along a stretch of old stone row houses and eventually, to a dead end. The university is in this suburb, and there were lots of young people ambling along the water, and a few other unsuspecting cyclists who within a few blocks were also looking for a way to escape the cobbles. I got back up to the bike path without the dreaded “cobble bottom,” and had a beautiful ride back to town, the wind pushing me along and the sun sparking the wavelets on the sea below.

On a whim I turned off the bike path when I saw some landmarks for Vegueta and locked my bike outside the big market. I’d seen photos, and of course took some myself, but they don’t do justice to the explosion of color when you walk in. It felt like walking through a wormhole into a painting that then came alive in front of my eyes. I wanted to eat everything in sight, to stuff my face with mangos and papaya and silky lychees, to fill my backpack with all the perfect veg in front of me and find a proper kitchen somewhere and cook. Realllly cook. And it was busy. This wasn’t a tourist attraction, although there were plenty of us there, and locals swarmed their favorite stalls, calling out to vendors by name. Avoiding the redolent fish section, I found a coffee bar towards the back, and enjoyed a strong decaf as I watched a family greet the jamon sellers and order their lunches, sharing slaps on the back, measuring of children’s height and tweaking of cheeks, and winks among the men, presumably about the mother’s pregnant belly.

The next day we both rode the other direction toward the ferry docks and the large mall nearby that advertised a supermarket called “Hiper Dino.” Apparently, this chain of supermarkets was considered the overall best option for provisioning because it has markets all over the city, including a large one close to the marina, its prices were very competitive, and they delivered to the boat. I’m not sure when the urge to minutely inspect every supermarket I see will ever wane after this peripatetic life. I find such joy now in discovering what’s available that I haven’t seen in months – it could be Goya black bean soup, or real brown sugar, or oat flour, or a small bottle of Cholula. We would keep Hiper Dino and several other markets on the rotation over the next few weeks.

From there we decided it was time to get passport photos taken, since we would need them in a few days for our ARC crew passes. It was surprisingly difficult to find a place to do this. We checked several downtown, then were sent to another mall on the other end of town, Las Arenas. This turned out to be a very vibrant place with bustling shoppers and lots of busy stores. There was a personalization shop that quickly took our photos, though we still had time to peruse their inventory while they printed them out. We decided to get Flying Fish coffee mugs made for us and Axel and Monique as welcome gifts and useful additions to the cupboard. (The handles were little carabiners, so the possibilities for geeking out were rife.) That important errand done, we cycled back to the marina along the waterfront. I was on my bike every day after that, often several times a day. I saw much more of the city than I would have without it and really loved the growing familiarity of the streets and neighborhoods.

We also spent a day in a rental car and explored the northern region of the island. Within a very short time outside of Las Palmas we were in verdant mountains following winding roads through small towns with amazing vistas. We’d been advised not to attempt to see the entire island’s worth of sights, as tempting as that was, and to focus in on one region. It was excellent advice. Most of the towns we’d been told to visit were within 10-20 kilometers of each other, so we spent more time exploring than we did driving.

After cathedrals, beaches and beautiful drives, we found a combination winery and coffee farm a little way off the beaten track and pulled in for a tour and tasting. Tucked into the side of a mountain, its vines and coffee trees were interspersed with mango and orange trees and an abundance of other flowering plants.

After the tour we ended up in a small, shaded dining area with tapas and a wine selection, followed by dessert and coffee. It was then we discovered several cages of parrots and other birds nearby and spent our last half hour or so on the finca conversing with the parrots, who found Peter particularly fluent. On the way back to the marina later that evening we stopped at the mother of all Hiper Dinos in a suburb of Las Palmas and did a first pass on our provisioning list. Off to a good start.