Secret Holidays In Gran Canaria
The Guardian in the UK has reported in its travel pages about an alternative to connventional holidays in Gran Canaria, that aren’t very well known about. They say:
We were sitting on a cliff top eating a camping stove dinner and gazing blissfully into the void. Behind us pine trees swished, 1,400m below the ocean thudded into the coastline, and in front, beyond a volcano piercing the cloud canopy, the sun took a bow of epic proportions. It was the kind of sunset you don’t want to take your eyes off: colours shifted imperceptibly as the sky drifted through the spectrum to black, then filled with stars. It was one of those joyous outdoor moments every committed camper hopes for: the ones that erase all those memories of sodden socks, sore limbs, over-sexed neighbours, sleepless nights and biblical floods. That recidivist campers are masochists with selective memory loss is no great revelation; what is, is that this particular moment happened in Gran Canaria.
The karaoke bars and Irish pubs of Playa del Ingles aside, camping on Gran Canaria, with its year-round sunshine and cheap charter flights, doesn’t sound like a bad idea. But a quick internet search deters most. Only two campsites come up clearly on Google: one is in a town . . . beside the airport on the windswept east coast; the other on the sunny though heavily developed south coast, is called Camping Guantánamo.
Not wanting to be intimidated by the unfortunate name we headed to the latter straight from the airport. But unlike its namesake, this Guantánamo had already been shut down. After lengthy discussions with the staff of a nearby restaurant and a wild goose chase through sprawling, soulless tourist developments, we spent our first night curled up in the back of our hire car.
Next morning, we left the condo-jungle in search of the island’s wilder side. On the Gran Canaria map it seems a straightforward affair: a big mountain rising from the ocean, a circle of rock 50km in diameter with a high point in the middle. In reality, it’s a bit more complicated: falling away from the Cumbre, literally the summit, were dozens of barrancos, deep gorges gauged into the volcanic rock that meander towards the coast.
To read the full article click here and for more information about the island visit http://www.yourgrancanaria.net
Tags: camping, Gran Canaria, holidays, Spain, travel, vacation