20. Spring album

Spring is sprung,
The grass is ris,
I wonder where my camera is!

That little ditty was imagined before the age of mobiles. Now no-one need lose that shot that proves he was there or that reminder full of colour and selfie smiles unless, that is, he forgot to charge the damn thing!

El Hierro is not grandiose like the Rocky Mountains. Its beauty is more intimate, on a more human scale, not only in size but also emotionally. It's not the unchangeable mountain reflected in an unruffled lake but the unpredictable response of life to the equally unpredictable elements life feeds on.

This year Spring is indeed strange. It was warm in January and the plums blossomed even before the almond trees. Then it was cold and windy and now the plums are blossoming again, rectifying their mistake. Our Wistaria brought out one early tentative bunch of blue perfume at least six weeks ago. Now it should be in full flower but it isn't. Just a few young bronze leaves. Then again, since October it has only rained less than a half of what it usually does by this time. Between them, the NAO, the Niño and Climatic Change are doing their best to promise us an interesting year, to say the least.

I'll be going out with my camera (if I can find it!) and my mobile over the next few weeks and will add new photographs to this album. So do come back to this post from time to time.

These fig trees will soon have tender green leaves and the first of their two yearly crops

The bright pink blossom of a peach reveals abandoned terraces

Clumps of some sort of daisy cover the high pastures in the west of the island

The giant dendelion endemic to El Hierro in the garden next to an almond tree with a few late blossoms

This year the most photographed field in El Hierro, at the turning to El Pinar near San Andrés

The birth of a new cane on a grapevine with a baby panicle which will become a bunch of grapes.

Small figs growing on last year's wood. These will be the first crop ripening at the beginning of summer. The second crop which ripens in autumn grows on this year's wood.

The wonderfully scented orange blossom. A suggenstion of fruit to come is on the left.

At last the Jasmin and Wistaria

The vegetable garden was earlier this time last year. Apricot in blossom on the left.

Freesias

Wild peas

19. Farewells and friends

I’ve been rather quiet recently. February and March are for us quite busy months, in terms of work and socially, too. The vineyard needs a lot of attention: the grass and weeds need cutting and the vines need pruning. But the wonder of seeing, often in a question of days, new growth sprouting from the buds we carefully left on the cut-back canes and the minute inflorescences that will become future bunches of fruit make it all worthwhile. It’s also the time when friends who every year spend part of the winter here leave to get some skiing in the north or to see the spring start further south. It’s a time of farewell dinners, glasses raised, and seeing-off trips to the airport.

As in most places where people go on holiday or become “foreign residents”, it’s difficult to make real friends with the locals in the Canaries, so foreigners tend to mix more with people like themselves, usually of their own nationality. This is especially so in a small island like El Hierro. The Herreño is hospitable, funny, easy to get on with (if you don’t mind unexplained delays when getting the plumbing done) and often surprisingly generous. But he is the islander and you will always be the outsider. His society, despite apparent internal rifts and quarrels, is closely knit. Like the people from La Gomera, the people of El Hierro are all cousins, perhaps not literally but family ties are strong and very, very extensive. They had to be like this since it was a forgotten island, left to itself, and conditions were sometimes so hard that, as in the middle of the twentieth century, the population had to emigrate en masse. So, if you spend some time here, you’ll get to know a lot of people, acquaintances not friends although they’ll call you “amigo”.

An Herreño I once knew, he’s long dead now, was a man who had led a convulsive, hard life but was still able to talk about it with clarity and devilish humour. We were talking about “amigos”. He maintained he had never had a real friend and I said I had.
“What is a friend?” he asked.
“You tell me,” I said.
“A friend is someone you can wake up at two o’clock in the morning and say ‘Come on, get up, I’m going to kill Eusebio!’ and who pulls on his trousers to go with you to help.”
There aren’t many like that, especially if Eusebio is their cousin!

They can't see us behind the tinted airport glass but they know we're there. So they wave.
Or are they waving goodbye to the island?

18. Kilroy was here

People have an almost irresistible urge to leave their mark wherever they go. I remember going up to Las Cañadas in Tenerife many years ago. The road passed a spring called "Fuente de Joco". Over most of the other graffitti, some British hooligan had painted in huge white letters on the rock-face behind the spring "JOCK'S FONT". Criminal but funny! Luckily, on El Hierro we don't get many hooligans, just occasional lovers cutting his and her initials into a wooden guard rail appropiately at the edge of a precipice.

The last persistent Kilroys we had in El Hierro were here probably six hundred years ago, perhaps much earlier.They left words in an ancient alphabet inscribed into the surface of rocks. Juan Álvarez Delgado, in my opinion the best authority on these questions, called them "Libico-Berber inscriptions". The alphabet appears to be ultimately derived from the Phoenician which later spread, with variants, via Carthage (now Tunis) throughout North Africa and the Sahara. One variant is still used by some Touregs.

Our seaman's name may have been read from top to bottom
or from bottom to top. In any case it should be translated as
"Kilroy"! This inscription was found recently near
La Restinga.

It's fairly certain that the Canaries have been visited by seafarers since at least 500 BC. North African seamen were often crew and it is likely that some were left, voluntarily or not, on the island. Significantly, these inscriptions are often located near places where ships could approach the coast. So we can picture one of those stranded seamen anxiously watching day after day for a sail on the horizon. He may not have been literate but he could probably write his name, and so he did, into the surface of the rock. Some of these inscriptions are accompanied by simple figures that are clearly not letters. One repeated figure is a circle exuding clouds and could be a sort of helmet or hat with feathers. If so, these inscriptions may even be medieval (in our sense of the word).

There is another totally different sort of inscription on the island, similar to those dating at least from the bronze age and found in many parts of Europe and the southern shore of the Mediterranean. Perhaps better described as "rock art" they consist of circle, lines, squiggles, spirals and other forms distributed apparently haphazardly on the rock face. These will be the subject of another post later on.

If you like exploring for this sort of thing, take a bottle of water with a spray trigger. Often the inscriptions are only fully visible if the rock is wet. One of the latest ones to be discovered was found by a tourist near La Restinga, so don't lose heart if you're not lucky first time.

"Kilroy was here" was, and perhaps still is, a common phrase scribbled in jest on the walls of public lavatories, historic buildings, classrooms, prison cells, phoneboxes etc.

17. The wind, the wind, the wicked wind …

 The wind, the wind, the wicked wind

That blows the girls’ skirts high!

But God is just and sent the dust

To blind the old man’s eye.

Of course El Hierro is windy. It’s an island. It’s in the Atlantic directly in the line of the northeasterly Trade Winds that blow for most of the year. Like water in a rocky stream, where their passage is obstructed they whip around the sides and over the top of the island. Little more than persistent sea breezes at sea level, higher up and in the east and west of the island solitary trees become wind-cripples – in fact the island’s emblem is a grotesquely twisted juniper (Juniperus phoenicea). Sometimes we get stronger winds, usually from the north or northwest, with gusts above 100 km/h. The strongest I’ve experienced were gusts of over 150 km/h which broke a large apricot tree in half and blew away our greenhouse!

However, our wind is also responsible for one of our island’s claims to worldwide fame. We will one day generate from the wind 100% of our domestic consumption of electricity. When you come up from the airport you’ll go round a bend and suddenly see five gigantic windmills peeping over the mountains at you. They gyrate slowly and don’t make that “wishy” sound that some do, only a deep baritone hum of heavy gears. The idea is that the electricity they produce supplies the grid and also pumps water up to a deposit which is really just a crater lined with plastic. On those days when there is no wind the water from the crater rushes down through turbines to generate the electricity the still air is not generating. In other words the craterful of water is a sort of gigantic battery!

A visitor the other day said our electricity must be cheap. It isn’t. Electricity is the same price to the consumer everywhere in Spain. The advantages to the island are others, the praises of which are sung at almost every mention of the system so I won’t go into them. If you are really interested in this fascinating project check out the official site in English:
http://www.goronadelviento.es/index.php
and then these two opposing evaluations:
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34424606
http://euanmearns.com/el-hierro-revisited/

An afterthought: as far as I know this project has hardly any negative effects on the environment. In fact, I think the wind farm actually livens up the rather desolate landscape where it is sited.

16. Classical Music

The appreciation of Classical Music has a very long tradition in the Canaries and some thirty-one years ago the first edition of The International Festival of Music of the Canaries was held. The Festival is financed by the Canary government and almost all the concerts are programmed in the two provincial capitals, Santa Cruz de Tenerife and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, which makes it difficult for the inhabitants of the smaller islands to attend. In compensation, I suppose, some of the smaller groups visit us during the Festival.

We are lucky. Not only are they first-rate musicians of international reputation but our concerts are gratis. It is true the Festival cannot ship whole orchestras, pianos, harpsichords and organs around the islands so we are very unlikely to have Beethoven’s Ninth

Symphony. But we do have less pretentious music at the hands of trios, quartets … up to chamber orchestras of twenty musicians playing pieces from Purcell to Shostakovich. This year we have had musicians of the relevance of the Trondheim Soloists and the Signum Quartet. The concerts are usually held in churches: wonderful settings and the acoustics are excellent. On the down side, it is January or February and churches are always cold and, secondly, pews are notoriously hard, so bring a pullover and perhaps one of those discreetly thin cushions.

During the rest of the year there are occasional musical events of a lighter nature and there is also a privately organized alternative festival. Otherwise, you always have the Spanish Radio Clásica 24-7.
 

The Signum Quartet playing at the church of El Pinar, February 2016.

15. Guachinche

Guachinche (pronounced wachinchey) is a sort of primitive eating-house that originated in Tenerife where local winegrowers opened a makeshift tavern and sold a few simple dishes to accompany their wine. When their year’s wine had all been sold, they would close the establishment until the next year’s was ready. These guachinches became so popular in Tenerife that proper restaurants began to protest. Especially because the guachinches started offering more extensive menus, commercial spirits and other producers’ wines. The authorities stepped in and regulated the sector.

Recently several guachinches have opened in El Hierro, and others have closed. They are not true guachinches because the person who runs them does not produce the wine, but that doesn’t matter to you, does it? You obviously won’t find them advertized in the restaurant guide, but driving along you may see a tatty hand-painted sign pointing down, or up, a side road. Go and have a look. A good tactic is to ask what they offer and when they are open so that you can come back another day. See how many people are there and what the food looks like. If there are tables with ten people happily shouting at one another and you see huge grilled pork ribs and jugs of “vino de pata” bandied about, you’re probably onto a good thing. Remember though, local people don’t eat at European times. They don’t turn up for lunch before two or three and nobody is ready for dinner before nine. And don’t expect anything fancy: for starters fresh cheese or “garbanzas” – chickpeas in sauce; the main course is usually grilled meat – pork chops, pork ribs or steak – or perhaps they only serve grilled fish. Chips are more often provided than the famous Canary “papas arrugadas” – wrinkled potatoes. Be wary of salads. Dessert is most often reduced to commercial ice-cream from a freezer.

One final suggestion: make sure you go with someone from the islands, preferably El Hierro. He/she will be able to make things easier and help create the jovial laid-back atmosphere that going to a guachinche implies.

One of the more elaborate guachinches. The boss is trying to convince me his wine is better than mine! Photo: C. Axelsson

14. Vino de Pata

Sooner or later someone is going to sing you the wonders of "Vino de Pata". They'll tell you it is the traditional wine of El Hierro, strong, unadulterated, home-made just like their grandfather made it. All this is true, well, more or less ...

The name "Vino de Pata", which means something like "wine made with the feet", is a brilliant example of modern marketing. It gives the impression of colourful young peasants with their shorts rolled up, treading the grapes in the sunlight to the sound of guitars and pretty young voices. It is true that after the middle of the nineteenth century winemaking on the island became a household rather than business activity. It was a fairly alcoholic beverage (around 14-15% alcohol, the maximum the natural local yeast produces), often somewhat oxidized and with a high level of acetic acid. These factors gave it its characteristic taste, its stability and a headache the morning after. In the 1990's the first modern winery was opened and the few families that actually sold wine felt their source of extra income was threatened. They spread the rumour that, unlike their "natural" brew, the new winery made "chemical" wine with artificial colours and taste. One of them called his wine "Vino de Pata" and the name stuck. There wasn't a bar on the island that didn't offer "Vino de Pata" as well as a small selection of wines from the mainland. Wines from the island's legal commercial wineries were often boycotted.

Of course, since that time the producers of "Vino de Pata" have improved their brews and they quite often resemble modern commercial wines. Occasionally you may even find one that is better than some of the wines guarranteed by our "Denomination of Origin". But, as they may not have passed any sanitary control or been declared to the taxman, nowadays they are less often promoted in bars and restaurants. Anyway, if you decide to try one, remember it has no pedigree.

What more do you need? Conversation over a glass of wine at sundown, a few locally grown olives, a chunk of matured goat's cheese ... For the ladies, perhaps something a little less rustic?