Santa Cruz de La Palma; Thursday, 23 February, 2023

As my next flight wasn’t until the late morning I was able to have a bit of a lie in and a later breakfast before catching the 9am shuttle bus back to the airport.

After checking in and dropping my bag off for the second time in 18 hours I headed through security and eventually over to the gate for my flight down to La Palma.

Once again it was an uneventful flight, albeit a bit bumpy in places, the final approach was pretty spectacular as at one point for the approach we had to flight directly at the island and make a last minute turn coming quit close the cliff walls of the edge of the island. After landing the bags came round surprisingly quickly and I was out the front of the terminal with 10 minutes to spare before the bus onto Los Cancajos.

I made it to the hotel, checked in and dropped off my stuff before heading out for a walk around the resort, including a stroll along the seafront walkway that runs along the length of Los Cancajos.

Los Cancajos was originally a small village around salt-pans, whose major industry had been salt production, but by the latter half of the 20th century as the other Canary Islands had boomed with tourism it was decided to re-use the now abandoned flat pans as a convenient building space to build resorts on, and what resulted was the Los Cancajos of today.

There is very little evidence of the past, other than what looks like the ruined remains of a pier near towards the south of the centre. Most of the resort hotels and apartment blocks have their own swimming pools as the sea is quite rough here and the black lava sand beaches aren’t as comfortable on the feet for walking on as a typical sand beach (and in February the sea was really quite cold).

After having a wander around town for a little while I headed back to the hotel and went for a quick dip in the pool before having a shower and then heading down for dinner.