There is a magical place of exuberant vegetation where the most intense green has devoured roads, bridges, streams, waterfalls and cliffs. It seems like something out of the deepest mountains of Costa Rica, but it is in Spain and it is a great plan for hiking in winter, because the weather is always good here. It is a jungle, but harmless.
We are talking about the Garajonay National Park, located in La Gomera. Although the weather is almost always good in the Canary Islands, due to the altitude of the island and its tropical climate, more humidity accumulates in this area, allowing the vegetation to expand freely. This is how this 4,000-hectare forest, declared a World Heritage Site and Biosphere Reserve, was born.
This beautiful virgin forest is full of waterfalls and laurel forest, a species that is found in very few places in the world. La Gomera is one of them and this laurel forest has flooded everything with intense green, crowning the central area of the island with the most majestic lushness.
To visit it, the ideal is to start at the Juego de Bolas Visitor Center. Many routes and accesses leave from there, marked by difficulty and time. All paths are marked and we can go with our pets, as long as they are on a leash. Here no one misses these forests with more than a thousand years of history.
The legend of Gara and Jonay
In this forest is located the saddest and most dramatic love legend, the one they call the 'Spanish Romeo and Juliet', although in reality they were aborigines and not Spanish, because this story predates the conquest of the Canary Islands. The story goes that the Gomera princess Gara and the heir of a Tenerife monarch Jonay fell in love. However, their feuding families prohibited and persecuted their love, so they decided to jump into the void and die together in what is now known as Garajonay.
