Page 018 Gran Canaria 06/11/2013 09:15 Page 1
JANUARY 2014 PAGE 18
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DESTINATION CANARIES
ou could call it a camino to the Calima. Irish people have long fallen in love with the Calima, the warm sandy breeze that blows from the Sahara that blows to Gran Canaria and is responsible for those famous Maspalomas sand dunes. On EI 782 en route to the sun and over the last St Patrick’s Day I met some of them, people who have returned to the same group of resorts for three decades. On St Patrick’s Day in Playa des Ingles (it had an air of Playa des Irlandeses for the day) we were guests of Victor Auz, a gracious lawyer who serves as consul general of Ireland on the island, for St Patrick’s day. The day was marked with a message from Michael D Higgins and one of the sweetest prize giving ceremonies I have ever attended, “for being nice people” to Rita and Jack Costigan, Connie Scanlan and Laly Lozano Martel, a Canarian with the most extraordinary Limerick accent acquired after years of dealing with Irish clients for Corona, Stein and Sunway. It wasn’t the biggest Patrick’s day party I have ever attended, but it might be the most pleasant. As night fell a Thin Lizzy cover group gave it socks in a stage outside Mulligan’s Pub. They should give more of those nice person awards.
Gran Sands
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Eoghan Corry in Gran Canaria
The famous inland craters: one of the enduring attractions of Gran Canaria
C is the second most popular Canary after Lanza. Every year 90,000 visitors from Ireland trundle to this island alone, as many as Greece. What brings them? Urs Rohrig hosts many of them at the Hotel Marina Suites in Puerto Rico. He knows what his Irish guests like. The Irish spend more money on holiday than any other nation, he says.
THE LOW DOWN
■ There are seven Canary islands in all, the big four, La Gomera, La Palma, Hierro and six islets of which the only inhabited one is La Graciosa ■ Tourism fashioned Gran Canaria from the moment the first Swedish charters in the 1960s and now of the Canaries total of 12m some 4m come to GC, 4m Germans, 3.5m English, 3.5m Scandinavians, 500,000 Danes, then Dutch, Irish and French. ■ Emmett’s Irish liquor is made from Canary bananas and exported back to the Canaries
Get it right, get the crispy bacon in the right place at the breakfast buffet, the conviviality in the bar, the pace of life just at the right pitch, and they keep coming back. Marina Suites, and a few other local hotels is one of the reasons why Puerto Rico is our second most popular resort on Gran Canaria - I retell the story of a travel agent who once sent someone to the wrong Puerto Rico .
■ Sam Stephenson designed some of the avant garde apartment buildings in Puerto Rico. ■ The far western show Sioux City is a popular excursion at a faux American desert film set built for the 1975 Lee van Cleef movie Take a Hard Ride, with a classic rope and knife act and the Leha family show. www.siouxcity.es ■ Gloria Palace Thalasso & Resort hotel (www.gloriapalaceth.com). Take time to enjoy the thalasso therapy facilities, the pools and the sun.
ctivities and variety can do it as well. Some of these are water based, cruises along the shoreline and some exhilarating paragliding out of Mogán, described in the brochures as a fishing village but it is tourists that are baited and reeled in here nowadays. Mogán is the only town where tourists can get married on Gran Canaria. A trek inland can be just as exciting and surprising. A drive up to the 16km wide crater that dominates Gran Canaria. Travel a few kilometres away from the shore and you find yourself in little villages where mass tourism is far behind, At Fataga you can stop and sample the ancient atmosphere, at Guayadeque Ravine you can do a light
hike, at Cueva Bermeja in the Tagoror Restaurant you can lunch in a real cave in, at the poetic picture postcard village of Aguimes you can, well, write poetry, or just take an expresso and sit in the street and try to imagine what Hemingway or Charlie Donnelly might say about it. The most iconic feature is not faraway at all, it is just outside our hotel, the dunes at Maspalomas, a tidy slice of Sahara sand hills misplaced here by the ocean current system and the wind. They are the island’s most accessible natural attraction, and like all of nature’s beauties in a mass tourism age, under threat. An unexpected hazard is the nudist area on the way. Not glamorous at
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all, unless crinkly Germans are your taste.
he capital Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, capital of the island of Gran Canaria, is situated on the north-eastern vertex of the island where a small peninsula sticks out into the sea. It is a five euro, one hour daytrip into the country’s past. The centre of the city is divided by the old Guiniguada Gully where a little Seville colony was established after the five year battle for the island. Triana, the oldest neighbourhood, even looks like Seville. This is where Francisco Franco planned his war, was transported by an English sympathiser Webb who took him to Morocco. The clock is even left stopped at 17 July 1936 in the 18 room boutique Hotel Madrid. In the San Juan district where the houses are painted, as fishermen do, in the colour of their boats.
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otel Palm Beach in Maspalomas was my home for five nights. It is a six floor hotel with the most amazing retro bar, a splendid path to a splashy beach double-dip beach. Two pools and a breakfast buffet designed for every nationality (you can always tell that Germans come in numbers when the buffet is stacked with jugs of tomato juice). I like to sleep with my balcony door open and the sound of the waves filtering through. There is nothing more conducive to a night’s sleep than the sound of the ocean outside. They tell me one client once complained about the sound of the waves. They said they would switch it off.
■ Aer Lingus flies three times weekly to Gran Canaria throughout the year on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. EI 783 from Gran Canaria departs at tea-time leaving time for a last day at the resort or some shopping.