We’re on our fourth Canary Island today, if you count Gran Canaria where we flew in at midnight. We took no time to look around Gran Canaria other than the cruise ship terminal area (probably a mistake in travel planning, but who knew?). So, three islands on which we’ve gone sightseeing, and those three could not be more different. Like different countries.

Lanzarote is a black island ruled by a dead artist – his architectural rules for houses that must be painted white with green doors (blue doors on the coast) still are in place. The entire island is a monument to the artist/architect, something I wouldn’t have expected. Here’s an example.

Gomera, visited yesterday, is a small round island with no flat spots. It has enough elevation changes to exhaust a mountain goat. They’ve built roads in places I wouldn’t put a bike path – one twitch and you’re doing the full Thelma/Louise thing into a canyon. The bus rides on those roads up and down the mountains were terrifying. We saw rain forests, mountain rocks worthy of Yosemite (title photo above), ocean views, and crazy numbers of agriculture terraces (no flat spots, remember?). We walked across a volcano’s caldera, a weird feeling. I’m simply amazed that anyone lives full time on Gomera – the population there must have the strongest thighs in the world. Everything is straight uphill. Picture below, taken in a moment of terror on a narrow road.

And finally Tenerife, our stop today and tomorrow, is urban. Very urban – we could be in any coastal city of a million or so people. I suspect there’s a lot of the island’s interior that is wild, but we haven’t seen any of that. We drove 30 minutes out of town to a winery where we tasted some decent wine and learned to make mojo (mo-ho), a classic Canarian sauce. We made both the red and the green and they were excellent (mojo-making set up in the picture below). We tried the red with another Canarian classic, wrinkled salt-boiled potatoes, and once again, excellent! I intend to make these back in the states.

The winery we visited had some decent wine and an interesting theme – their claim to fame is a quarterly celebration of Wine and Sex. Seriously. It’s a fourth-generation family winery, and apparently the current generational owners like to party hard. The video of their latest event was…intense. They seem to take their wine and sex seriously.

So three islands and three quite different terrains and experiences. This evening I’m passing up a chance to visit the highest point in Spain, the top of Mt Tiede here in Tenerife, mostly because I don’t want the 90 minute bus ride each way. I had enough bus rides up and down mountains yesterday, thank you. But the sight of a single 12,000 foot peak on this island is impressive. The final picture below, taken from a Gomera hillside, shows Tiede popping up above the clouds from 100+ miles away.