We were not aware of this, but on February 2014, along with the shooting of newest Ron Howard’s Film “In the Heart of the Sea”, The Independent travel writer Linda Cookson decided to visit our island, too. She then wrote a lengthy article on the island. Here are some highlights we specially enjoyed:
At first sight, pint-sized La Gomera – sitting prettily in an island chain renowned for its equable climate – might seem a strange location to have settled on for a tale built around tempest-lashed heroics.
But Howard and his scouts definitely knew what they were doing. As the second-smallest of the Canary Islands, a one-hour ferry-ride from Tenerife and with no international airport, La Gomera is a world apart from the mass-tourism of its larger neighbours. With only a handful of low-key resorts, there was never going to be much risk of the Essex’s hapless crew fetching up on a jarring parade of neon-signed shops peddling water-wings or advertising jet-skis for hire. Instead, the island’s starkly rugged coastline of awesome volcanic cliffs rippling down to the water’s edge in stiff rocky folds, feels almost eerily enduring – and (crucially for the film, of course) totally undateable. Inland, the mountainous centre is cloaked in a dense, misty rainforest of ancient trees hung, Druid-like, with beards of moss and lichen. It’s as timeless and unspoilt as you could hope for.
With the island still very much a novice in the tourism stakes, the whole ambience is refreshingly uncynical.
La Gomera is also looking to the future. Although the island has been recognised for some time as a paradise for walkers, its more mainstream attractions – uncommercialised beaches and picture-postcard mountain villages – have remained a well-kept secret. There’s real excitement now among Gomeros that this major, potentially world-wide, exposure will encourage new visitors to fall for their island’s sleepy charms and living history. (After all, as everyone was keen to remind me, San Sebastián was the starting point for Christopher Columbus’s epic 1492 Atlantic crossing. And where else in the world will you find “El Silbo”, an indigenous whistling language developed so that farmers could communicate with each other across jaw-droppingly steep terraces?)
I hope you enjoy this article as much as I did. A pity the writer did not get to do much visiting around La Gomera, as she could have discovered plenty of unspoiled treasures in Vallehermoso, Agulo and Hermigua, but if it were us, we wouldn’t have wondered much far from where the Hollywood Action was taking place. Maybe next time! Click here for the full article.
Quotes source: La Gomera: Plenty of Star Quality (Linda Cookson – The Independent) http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/europe/la-gomera-plenty-of-star-quality-9143814.html
