El Hierro is the smallest and most south-westerly of the Canary Islands, 269 square kilometres of volcano with fewer than twelve thousand people on it. It has no resorts, one traffic light and a coastline that is nearly all cliff. It has been a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve since 2000 and a UNESCO Global Geopark since 2014, and for long stretches it runs entirely on its own wind and water.
Most people reach it from Tenerife, and the first thing worth getting right is how.
Getting there, honestly
There are two ways over, and they are not equivalent.
- By ferry from Los Cristianos, in the south of Tenerife, to Puerto de La Estaca. It takes around two and a half hours each way. As a day trip that means five hours on a boat and roughly six on the island, which is tight but doable if you start early and hire a car at the port.
- By plane from Tenerife North, about forty minutes. This is the sensible option for a single day, and it costs less than most people assume.
Whichever you choose, book a hire car before you go. There is a bus network but it is built for residents, not for someone with one day and a list. And if the trip allows it at all, stay a night: El Hierro is the one island in the archipelago where rushing genuinely spoils it.
What to see
Mirador de la Peña
Start here. César Manrique, the artist who gave Lanzarote its visual identity, designed this viewpoint over the El Golfo valley: a low stone building that leans out over a thousand-metre drop, with the bay and the Roques de Salmor below. Go in the morning, before the cloud comes in over the ridge.
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The natural pools
El Hierro has no sandy beaches to speak of, and it does not need them. The swimming happens in rock pools carved by the lava and the sea: La Maceta and Charco Azul in the El Golfo valley, and Pozo de las Calcosas up on the north coast, reached by steps down past a hamlet of stone houses with thatched roofs.
Two rules, and they matter here more than elsewhere: go at low tide, and take water shoes. The floor is volcanic rock throughout. The same logic that governs the pools on the bigger islands applies, and it is set out in Tenerife natural pools.
El Sabinar
The juniper grove on the western plateau is the image El Hierro puts on its postcards, and for once the postcard undersells it. The trees have been bent almost flat by a wind that never stops, some of them twisted through 180 degrees and still growing. There is nothing else quite like it in the islands. The track out is unpaved but fine in a normal car.
Mirador de las Playas
The east-coast viewpoint, looking down onto the cliffs and the black beaches from a thousand metres up. It works best late in the day, when the light comes in sideways across the whole face of the island.
La Restinga and the Mar de las Calmas
The southern tip is a marine reserve, and the water there is so consistently still that the name means the Sea of Calms. It is rated among the best diving in Europe: volcanic arches, caves and visibility that regularly passes thirty metres. If you dive at all, this is the reason to come.
It is also where the sea floor erupted in 2011, an underwater eruption that turned the water green for months and briefly closed the village. The island has been quietly volcanic ever since.
The sky
Almost no light and almost no people. The Milky Way is visible with the naked eye on most clear nights, and the island has a set of marked viewing points for it. If you are staying over, this is the thing that decides people.
The island that runs on its own weather
Worth knowing because you will drive past it. Gorona del Viento is a wind farm coupled to a pair of water reservoirs: when the wind blows it powers the island and pumps water uphill, and when it drops the water comes back down through turbines. El Hierro has covered long stretches, weeks at a time, entirely on its own renewable power. For an island of this size that is not a gesture, it is the actual electricity system.
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Two pieces of history that stick
For centuries El Hierro was the end of the known world: Ptolemy placed the prime meridian here, and European maps measured longitude from this island until Greenwich took over in the nineteenth century. The monument marking it stands at Orchilla, on the south-western tip.
And the Garoé, the sacred tree of the Bimbache people, is said to have supplied the island’s water by condensing the mist on its leaves and dripping it into cisterns below. The original was lost to a storm in the seventeenth century; the one standing today was replanted, and the story is still on the island’s coat of arms.
Three more spots that only fit if you stay the night. Tamaduste, in the north-east and a quarter of an hour from the airport, is a narrow inlet of still water and the easiest swim on the island with children; the Charco Manso, a little further north, is more open and more exposed. And at Sabinosa, the Pozo de la Salud is a mineral spring credited with healing powers for centuries, with a spa beside it today.
Eating
El Hierro makes its own cheese with a protected designation of origin, smoked over fig and prickly pear, and its own wine from vines that grow at altitude on volcanic soil. Ask for either in a village bar and you will get the local one, because there is rarely anything else.
Fitting it into the trip
- One day. Fly, hire a car at the airport, and do Mirador de la Peña, El Golfo with a swim at La Maceta, El Sabinar and the Mirador de las Playas. That is a full day and it is enough.
- Two days. Add La Restinga, whether you dive or not, and a night for the stars.
- When to go. Any month; the coast stays between 20 and 26 degrees. The north side collects cloud, so if the valley is grey, drive over the ridge rather than waiting it out.
If you would rather island-hop somewhere closer to Tenerife, La Gomera is fifty minutes by ferry and works far better as a day trip. Back on the main island, everything else is under excursions in Tenerife, and the volcano that dominates the horizon from here is covered in Mount Teide.
