Sunshine Walks

When we rented our mountain villa, Karen and I imagined long country walks in the hills – we hadn’t quite registered yet that these were proper mountains not hills – and sunning on our terrace, reading. You can’t do those things, though, when it’s pissing down rain, or threatening to, with temperatures hovering below 10C. What a difference a week makes! The sun has returned to Las Vegas. Yesterday, we woke to blue skies and brilliant sunshine. It was 14C by mid-morning and we sat over our tea on the terrace and read the papers.

A little after 11, we donned our walking shoes and shorts and headed down the lane for our first proper hike – from Las Vegas, the tiny village where we’re staying, to Valsequillo, the ‘capital’ of the municipality to which Las Vegas belongs, a somewhat larger town across the ravine. The path goes down into the ravine, the Barranco de San Miguel, and up the other side. It was once the only way Las Vegans could reach the outside world. It’s a little over a kilometer and a half. The highway we take to get to Valsequillo by car was built in the 1930s and crosses the ravine at a bridge. 

The path to Valsequillo: before the descent

The path starts about 200 meters down the lane from our house. The first couple of times we looked at it, it was quite muddy. Today, it was more or less dry. It’s not a wide path, but appears well trodden. It goes for a short way through grass, past farm fields with flowering almond trees. When it comes to the edge of the ravine, the path turns and begins switching down the steep cliff. The walking is not difficult. The route guide we found on the Web says it’s about a 20 degree slope at its steepest, and the footing is mostly good. The views down into the ravine and across to Valsequillo on the other side, at the top of almost sheer cliffs, are impressive. 

Ruined mill at bottom of ravine

Starting out

View across the ravine to Valsequillo

At the bottom, we confirmed what we already really knew, that there are two routes to Valsequillo. The otherwise excellent signposting gives you no clue as to distances, and from this point, you can’t see where the paths start up the cliff, so we had to guess at which was the best and fastest route. We guessed wrong, but it didn’t really matter. It meant we walked a little further along the ravine bottom and then up a relatively steep, rocky path. The total walking distance was maybe 750 meters longer. We were out for a walk anyway, and the sun and warmth were lovely. Pixel boards in Valsequillo when we got there said it was 20C.

Bottom of Barranco de San Miguel

The ravine still has farms in it and once had a mill. The mill lies in ruins today, near where the path from Las Vegas comes down. We’ve been trying to figure out what Valsequillo means. My best, but mostly uninformed guess, is that it means Valley of the Biscuit. Valle is valley in Spanish, but could be shortened in a name to val. Sequillo is biscuit. The mill, when it operated, ground grain into gofio the local all-purpose flour. With which they could have made biscuits. See? Valsequillo. Anyway.

Bottom of Barranco de San Miguel: bamboo stand

The walk along the bottom took us through a bamboo glade. The ravine turns at one point and as we followed it around, a light breeze sprang up. We had been thinking that the one nice thing about being down so low was that there wouldn’t be much wind. Gran Canaria is known as a windy island and we have had our share of stiff, cool breezes. But this was a mild and pleasant one. 

Stopping for a rest on the way up to Valsequillo

Starting up the other side to Valsequillo

The path up was steeper than the one down from Las Vegas, but the views up and down the ravine and across to the sea are lovely. We made it to Valsequillo in a little over 50 minues. And that was with dawdling and stopping for picture taking.

View along Barranco de San Miguel: Valsequillo on right, Las Vegas in distance

View down Barranco de San Miguel: Las Vegas on left, Valsequillo on right

On the way up: view over farmhouse to sea

We had explored Valsequillo a little already. We did find the Tourist Information office this time, where we were able to pick up some seemingly quite good brochures on local walks. Each one has aerial-view maps, elevations, detailed descriptions of the route and the flora and fauna, along with nicely reproduced pictures. There are nine routes in the Valsequillo municipal area. 

Valsequillo: village church

We also stuck our heads into the village church, a relatively austere space with only a few nondescript paintings and some small 17th century carvings in a glass case. The stations of the cross are marked with simple brass Roman numerals bolted to the nave walls, that’s how plain it was. 

We sat at Bar de Tito, a little restaurant across from the church, and had a coke, and did some people watching. The bar itself was patronized by a trio of middle aged and elderly locals talking with the bar tender – Tito? It was a place people came for take-away lunches apparently. One fellow in gym shorts and a t-shirt stood at the bar for 20 minutes – waiting for his box lunch to come out of the kitchen, as we discovered – while his wife sat in the family SUV, parked up on the sidewalk out front. 

Valsequillo: hanging out at Tito's

Karen watched a little drama at the Santander bank next door, where a patron at the ATM had apparently had his bank card stolen by the machine. He started banging on the door to the bank which was already closed for lunch. Somebody finally come out. The same banker, a scruffy-bearded young man in a suit, emerged again soon after, locked up and came next door to Tito’s to pick up his lunch. As he came back out, he said to us, “You are from Canada?” A conversation in broken English – on his part, we spoke quite fluently – ensued. Tito had apparently told him we were from Canada, which he had gleaned from the fact that European card transactions with foreign cards give you the option of paying in Euros or your own currency. He would have seen that our option was to pay in Canadian dollars. We always pay in Euros, though, because the local banks never offer as good a deal on the currency exchange as Visa. This fellow wanted to let us know that we could have paid in our own currency. Yeah, thanks.

We decided to find the other path down into the ravine, which should have been, and was, at this end of town. There were no signposts pointing to it, but we found it and started down along a brick-paved street. At one point, we overshot the turn on to the path into the ravine, partly because it appeared to be a walkway into somebody’s farm, and was clogged with malodorous, bleating goats. 

Goat gauntlet

A fellow working in front of his house a little further on stopped us and set us on the right path. This route between Valsequillo and Las Vegas was both shorter and easier going than the way we went on the outgoing leg. We were back at the house in well under an hour.

The Almond Girl

Looking up to Valsequillo

The afternoon we whiled away with working on pictures, reading newspapers and soaking up the lovely sun on our terrace.

Today, Saturday, has so far been almost as sunny and warm as yesterday. We sat on the terrace in the morning again, then set out for another hike in the late morning. This time, we had to drive 20 minutes or so up the mountain to a little village off the main highway, Rincon de Tenteniguada. The walk sounded ideal: circular, about 3 km altogether, without too much climbing. 

I had punched the map coordinates of the starting point, given on the brochure we’d picked up the day before, into our GPS. It took us to a place where there were signs up with maps ostensibly showing where the walking routes were. But we couldn't make head or tail of the directions or the maps. They referred to places and streets that weren’t identified in the real world. We walked up in one direction a couple of hundred meters. I asked a guy working in a farm field if he could direct us, showed him the map and asked where our start point was. I think he might have been a foreign worker or possibly spoke some mountain dialect. In any case, he couldn’t understand me and/or didn’t know the answer. 

We tried driving back down a way but could find nothing that looked like the start point. So we went back up to the village, re-parked and asked in a little bar. The two people working there, a mother and her son, I think, were very helpful and did give us directions, but I don’t think they could really figure out the map either. It’s too bad. The municipality has obviously gone to some expense erecting guideposts for some of the walking trails – though evidently not the one we were looking for – and producing these elaborate brochures, but then drops the ball by not providing detailed enough directions to actually find the trail head.

Rincon de Tenteniguada: view over village to sea

Rincon de Tenteniguada: up the mountain

We ended up following the bar people’s directions, but it was clear they were not right. So we followed another walking route that took us up a steep paved road, then off on a narrow dirt path up a hill, past farms to a place where there were cave homes, Cuevas Blancas, according to the guidepost. The path petered out before we could get close enough for a good view of the cave dwellings. One of them looked as if it could have been inhabited until fairly recently. 

Rincon de Tenteniguada: prickly (the cacti)

It wasn’t the most successful outing, but the views – all the way to Las Palmas in places – were spectacular, and the ramshackle farmsteads we passed, interesting, the wild flowers and almond blossoms, very pretty. With all the back-and-forthing and looking for the right path, we were probably out almost as long as we had been the day before, though we didn’t walk as far. It was lunchtime by the time we got home, which we ate on the terrace again. 

Rincon de Tenteniguada: almond blossoms