53. Tourism in El Hierro

There have recently been protests in many parts of Spain against foreign tourism artificially raising the price of accommodation, making nights unbearably noisy, debasing tradition ...We really are the most fortunate of the Fortunate Isles, as the Canaries were once called: we have virtually no tourism, and certainly no massive tourism with hordes of drunken hooligans. Why not?

The most obvious reason is that El Hierro does not have those things that tourists really expect, not what people profess to want. We have no beaches to crowd with rented loungers; no little Englands complete with pubs, tandoories and fish-and-chips; no ‘vibrant’ night life; no souqs with the suggestion of poverty hidden just round the corner; no quaint bougainvillea-bedecked piles of white cottages; no exotic fruit split open by spectacular machete-wielding bronzed gods … El Hierro only has its unique beauty, varied and condensed into a few square miles emerging from the ocean. It has peace and unpolluted air – you can even see the Milky Way at night. It has, or could have, everything that makes for a real holiday.

The second most obvious reason is the cost of getting here. For example, a regular return flight from London to Tenerife in October (not especially high-season) last year would have cost you from 92€, BUT a return flight on the same dates from Tenerife to El Hierro would have cost you 118€. Residents in the Canaries have a 75% subsidy on inter-island flights. Please come to your own conclusions.

Thirdly, the island has never been promoted, sensibly at least. Few visitors believe the official blurb proclaiming the excellence of our ‘rich folklore’, ‘traditional craftsmanship’, ‘diverse cuisine’, ‘inimitable wines’ … If they do, they soon enlighten their friends when they get back home. And I don’t think the condescending articles by travel writers help much (1).  At one time there were offers to develop hotels, spas and so on from private investors. Our authorities quickly, and rightly, saw that the islanders would not put up with it and the projects were scrapped. In their place we promoted ‘quality tourism’, i.e. big boots and little woolen socks that consumed sandwiches (one a day made with half a roll of bread and two slices of cooked ham bought in a supermarket). Eventually we must have understood this kind of tourism went no way even to cover the cost of maintaining the ancient public footpaths crisscrossing the island. Recently, the idea has been revamped and, additionally, we now cater for bikers (hired mountain-bikes), long distance swimming and cross-country running.

The area known as Las Playas seen from almost a thousand metres above in the pine forest near El Pinar.
The building on on the coast in the centre of the photo is the Parador.

Then, of course, there are the questions of where to lodge the tourist and things for him and her to do. There are two or three very nice small hotels, some boarding houses and a very agreeable ‘Parador’ – state-run hotel. Quite simply insufficient if this is a sector to be developed. Some years ago I investigated setting up a ‘casa rural’. I came away with a fly in my ear convinced that it was a closed shop set up by and for a chosen few. Now there seem to be quite a lot of ‘casas rurales’ so things must have eased up considerably. And a new figure: "VV" - Holiday Home - a sort of casa rural which is not quaint.

As for things for the tourist to do there is very little available at present. But the municipal and island authorities are at last waking up and beginning to recognize and encourage private initiative. There are of course things in this sector that are already working. And others that are beginning to surface. Scuba diving (that was not a joke) at La Restinga is perhaps today’s major single attraction to the island. Paragliding from the spectacular heights above Frontera is becoming more popular.

So far we have indeed been lucky. The wait-and-see attitude of the islanders has paid off and preserved us from the terrible effects of the tourist industry’s insatiable appetite. Now we have to sit down, put aside vested interests and decide about the future; how to use what we have – our forests and protected areas, our coastline and waters, our weather, our mountains, … There are hopeful signs: the lighthouse at Punta de Orchilla, at the deserted westernmost point of the island, may be converted to a luxury hotel; winemakers are promoting visits to wineries and restaurants are taking gastronomy more seriously; there is talk of converting the island into a sort of organic oasis, etc. And then there are future oportunities for development that have hardly been considered yet. The island would be ideal for "residential tourism" especially for the retired, and also for specialized health centers, creative hubs ... Such things, though, require political and financial involvement.
 

Meanwhile, do come and visit the island. Before it's too late. Before someone decides for you what you should do and see, before our festivals become shows for television, before our history is rewritten, before what is typical becomes blandly comercialized ...

(1) https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2016/feb/07/el-hierro-lost-in-the-canaries

44. The Ritual Folk Music of El Hierro

Four hundred years ago Louis XIV, the Sun King, would put on his favourite costume of peacock feathers and prance around the salons of Versailles to the sounds of Le Canarien, the then popular dance of the ‘wild’ Canary islanders but undoubtedly refined for the courtly tastes of the day. Today, Canary folk music (confusingly known in Spanish as ‘Folklore’) has nothing to do with the Sun King’s inspiration but a lot to do with the crucible of peoples the Archipelago has been since then, varied and alive - Folias, Malagueñas, Polkas etc.- now often rendered anodyne by television and the tourist industry. This of course is also true of the folk music of El Hierro, or rather of that folk music the islanders emphatically call ‘folklore’. And here, of course, El Hierro differs from the other islands.

My neighbor has a seven-year-old whose grandfather made him a drum. Not a toy drum. A real big drum, almost as big as the boy, with the name of our village stencilled on the goatskin drum head. This summer we’ve had three months of drumming, at first pretty awful but drums must be in his genes because in the end we found ourselves listening for his progress. His elder brother plays the local flute – a bit of electricity conduit with holes drilled into it – and his father does, too. It is quite unlike any music I had ever heard before coming to the island. This really is folk music and part of the islanders’ folklore in the real sense of the word. It’s only played at processions during religious festivals and accompanies the dancers in red aprons and colourful headdresses you see prancing around like Louis XIV in airport photos and official brochures. The most imporant of these festivals is the "Bajada de la Virgen" (Descent of the Virgin) which is held every four years celebrating the intervention of the island's Patron Saint in putting an end to a terrible drought in 1741. The groups of musicians and dancers from every village in the island accompany Her image on a procession from Her hermitage on the common in the west of the island to Valverde in the east. A video of part of the procession in 2013:

This music is never sung. The instruments are drums, flutes and castanets. The flutes initiate each piece and the drums take their cues from the flutes, rather than the contrary as would be expected. The melodies, called ‘toques’ (tokays), are played in unison by the flutes and sound deceptively similar and basic. However, they are in fact extremely complex and delicate, with hardly discernible variations, even from one phrase to the next. The rhythms played by the flutes seem to flutter around those they have dictated to the drums which, in turn, guide the dancers. Each village has its own set of toques and some have specific uses: for example, for when the dancers are on level ground, or in the nave of a church, or for when the bearers lift the Virgin’s sedan onto their shoulders, and so on.

I don’t know when this unique music arose in, or came to, El Hierro. I have a feeling, however, it owes nothing to the island’s early European settlers and possibly to none of the later arrivals. If this is so it could well predate Louis XIV by centuries and even have been brought to the island when Carthage was still great and the Sahara had not quite dried out. That may well be romantic lucubration on my part but even so I hope this expression of genuine folk music remains just that, ritual folk music, part of the lore that has held and holds, the islanders together as a people, that has helped them, and still helps them, overcome the difficulties and pressures that threaten them. I hope this unique music is never debased to the status of curiosity and tourist attraction; that it is not further normalized or fostered as an element of identity by our institutions, and that it is never part of the school curriculum ... I hope it is left in the hands of the people like the master drum-maker, his son, Maso, and his grandsons, Cristian and Johan, to keep alive and pass down from generation to generation, as it has been for perhaps centuries. But I fear this hope may be a bit too much to ask.