Visit the interpretation centre of the Las Nieves park and Los Tilos at Los Sauces

Walk the old streets of San Andrés by the sea

Los Tilos, on the north-east of La Palma above San Andrés y Sauces, is one of the best-preserved laurel forests in the Canary Islands, and it was the first place on La Palma to be declared a biosphere reserve. It lies inside the Las Nieves natural park, created in 1987, and the park's interpretation centre is at Los Sauces. The springs of Marcos y Cordero above it, with the island's other springs and galleries, have long watered the farms below, where bananas are still the main crop. Down on the coast are the old village of San Andrés, a protected monument, and the sea pools of the Charco Azul.

Los Tilos: The Laurel Forest of La Palma

Drive or ride up to the summit and look down on the cloud sea from above it

Work out why here and not simply anywhere high: laminar Atlantic air over open ocean with no turbulence, which is what gives stable light

Book a guided visit into the observatory and see the scale of the instruments

Stay after dark somewhere on the ridge and find out what a sky with a lighting law over it looks like

Walk a stretch of the crater rim path along the top of the Caldera de Taburiente

The Roque de los Muchachos is the top of La Palma, and the observatory on it exists because of a very specific combination: great height, and smooth laminar Atlantic air arriving over open ocean with no turbulence in it, which gives stable, clean light. That is a rarer condition than altitude alone and it is why some of the largest telescopes in the northern hemisphere are up here. The island protects it with a sky law limiting lighting, so what you see with your own eyes from the summit road is also extraordinary.

Roque de los Muchachos: One of the Best Skies on Earth

Walk the Avenida Marítima and look at the run of carved wooden balconies over the sea wall

Work out what this port was: one of three authorised ports of the Spanish empire, with Seville and Antwerp

Find the replica of the Santa María, built as a naval museum in the middle of the town

Come for the Bajada de la Virgen, held every five years, and see the Dance of the Dwarves

Walk up into the Barranco de las Nieves behind the town to the sanctuary the Virgin comes down from

Santa Cruz de La Palma was one of the three official ports of the Spanish empire, alongside Seville and Antwerp, which is why a town of this size on a small island has the merchants' houses, the carved balconies and the churches that it does. Its street of wooden balconies on the Avenida Marítima is the image of the place. Every five years it holds the Bajada de la Virgen, a fortnight of ceremonies that includes the Dance of the Dwarves, in which dancers transform on stage into tiny figures in tricorn hats — a piece of theatre nobody has convincingly explained the origin of.

Santa Cruz de La Palma: A Colonial Port Frozen in Place

Stand at a viewpoint over the lava field and work out that 1,219 hectares of it is new ground made in three months

Find where Todoque was, and remember that the last buildings there were buried on 10 October 2021

Work out the timeline: first vent 19 September, longest eruption on record at eighty-five days, tremor gone by 13 December

Find out how the banana terraces below were affected and what rebuilding them has involved

Walk an authorised route onto the lava with a local guide, who will also tell you what it was like to live through

On 19 September 2021 a vent opened near El Paraíso in the municipality of El Paso, the first eruption on La Palma since Teneguía in 1971. It ran for eighty-five days, the longest recorded on the island. On 10 October the flow buried the last buildings standing in Todoque. By the time the tremor stopped on 13 December it had destroyed 2,988 buildings and covered 1,219 hectares, taken out water and power networks and cancelled some five hundred flights. People are still rebuilding. Go carefully and go respectfully: this is somebody's house under the lava.

Tajogaite: The Volcano That Erupted for Eighty-Five Days

Walk the Teneguía cone, which erupted for twenty-four days from 26 October 1971

Go on to San Antonio, which erupted in 1677, and find the Roque de Teneguía its lava wrapped round

Walk down to the Salinas de Fuencaliente and the two lighthouses at the southern point

Work out the colour contrast: black lava, white salt and the Atlantic, all in one frame

Find the petroglyphs on the Roque de Teneguía, cut by the aboriginal population long before either eruption

The southern tip of La Palma is where the island is still actively growing. San Antonio erupted in 1677 and Teneguía began on 26 October 1971 and stopped on 18 November — twenty-four days, the shortest of the eight eruptions La Palma has recorded since 1430, and the most recent anywhere in Spain until Tajogaite in 2021. The cone is 431 metres and takes its name from the Roque de Teneguía beside it, a phonolite dome ringed by the 1677 lava that carries aboriginal petroglyphs. Below them the Salinas de Fuencaliente work seawater into salt beside two lighthouses, one of 1903 and one modern, with black lava on one side and white salt pans on the other. The vines here grow in volcanic ash and make Malvasía.

Fuencaliente: Volcanoes, Salt and the Southern Tip

Walk into the laurel forest on a cloudy day, which is the weather it actually needs

Work out what you are standing in: a forest that covered Europe in the Tertiary and survives here and almost nowhere else

Find the difference between the true laurisilva and the drier fayal-brezal higher and more exposed

Look at the moss and epiphytes on the trunks and work out where the water is coming from — cloud, not rain

Climb to the Alto de Garajonay at 1,487 metres, the highest point of La Gomera, for the view of the cloud sea sitting on the island

Laurisilva — laurel forest — once covered almost the whole of Europe in the Tertiary, and then the ice ages killed it everywhere except a handful of Atlantic islands. Garajonay on La Gomera holds the best surviving example known in the Old World across 3,984 hectares, which is why it was made a national park on 25 March 1981 and listed by UNESCO in 1986. It works because the sea of cloud parks against the mountain and keeps the humidity almost constant with very little annual temperature swing. Close to fifty tree species grow in it, sorting themselves by ecology into true laurisilva and the drier fayal-brezal.

Garajonay: A Forest Left Over From the Tertiary

Hear silbo demonstrated across a barranco and work out that this is Spanish, not a code

Try to whistle a word yourself and find out how hard it actually is

Work out why the island needed it: ravines that take hours to cross and voices that carry nowhere

Find out how close it came to dying — telephones, the end of herding, and a generation who thought it was embarrassing

Find out what the Canarian government did in 1999 and why teaching it in schools was the thing that saved it

La Gomera is cut into deep ravines, so getting from one side of a valley to the other on foot takes hours while shouting across gets you nowhere. The islanders whistle instead — silbo gomero is Spanish rendered as whistled tones, and it carries up to five kilometres. It was widespread in the 17th century, and telephones and the collapse of herding nearly killed it: by the 1980s it was associated with rural poverty and people stopped teaching their children. The Canarian government made it a protected ethnographic heritage in 1999 and put it on the school curriculum, which is why it is still alive.

Silbo Gomero: The Language You Whistle

Drive the mountain road from the Pradollano ski resort into the Sierra Nevada National Park — the paved road climbs above 2800m on the approach to the observatory, offering an unobstructed southern horizon above the Mediterranean

Visit the Observatorio de Sierra Nevada at 2896m on a public open day — run by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía since 1962, with optical and infrared telescopes

Summit Mulhacén (3479m), the highest peak in mainland Spain, and photograph the coast of Africa on the southern horizon on a clear morning

A Class 1 IDA dark sky designation covers the summit area of Spain's highest mountain range — the Sierra Nevada Observatory at 2896m sits on the approach to Pico Veleta (3398m), the second highest peak in mainland Spain

The Sierra Nevada Observatory and Mulhacén

Take the Teleférico del Teide cable car to 3555m and photograph the cloud layer below — on a clear night the neighbouring islands of La Palma, La Gomera and El Hierro are visible from the upper platform

Watch sunrise from the Roques de García volcanic formations on the Las Cañadas caldera floor — the lava geometry in pre-dawn light is one of the most extraordinary landscapes in the Atlantic

Visit the Observatorio del Teide on a public guided tour — the IAC observatory on Teide's flank is one of the best-equipped professional observatories accessible to the public in Europe

Drive the TF-21 road through the caldera to the Boca Tauce viewpoint at midnight and photograph the Milky Way above the Teide silhouette

Spain's highest mountain rises from the Atlantic above Tenerife in a UNESCO-protected caldera — El Teide holds Class 1 dark sky status, where professional astronomical observatories share the volcano's shoulder with a public cable car reaching 3555m