Our first full day in La Palma, and I realise this trip almost completes my personal tour of the Canary Islands — Lanzarote’s surreal lava fields, Fuerteventura’s endless sand dunes, the pine-forested peaks of Tenerife (twice), and the jungled ravines of La Gomera. Does a layover in Gran Canaria count? Probably not, but it’s on the list all the same.
Today, I set my sights on something a little more haunting: the volcano caves near Todoque. I’d read about the lava tubes formed during past eruptions and thought a journey south would make a good day trip. But what began as idle curiosity turned into something far more intense.
Driving south through the sleepy town of Los Canarios, the road began to twist and drop — and without realising it, we were suddenly in the heart of the destruction zone from the 2021 eruption of Cumbre Vieja.
It hit hard.
A temporary road has been carved directly through solidified lava — a jarring black scar running through what used to be homes, gardens, lives. One moment, you’re passing banana plantations and sleepy whitewashed villages; the next, you’re cruising through an alien world of twisted, frozen rock. The lava didn’t just stop at the edge of town — it devoured it. Entire ground floors of buildings are buried, their upper stories bizarrely poking out like surreal sculptures in a charcoal sea.
We pulled over at one point, near where Todoque used to be. What was once a village is now silence and ash. You can trace the path the lava took from the ridge above — a vast, brutal black ribbon stretching down from the Cumbre Vieja like a wound. It’s breathtaking in scale, yes — but it’s also horrifying. You don’t just see the eruption's impact; you feel it. The weight of it. The stillness after chaos. I forgot to take any photos, was just dumbfounded at the sight around us.
After some quiet reflection, we carried on through to Los Llanos de Aridane, one of La Palma’s livelier towns, where life feels like it’s cautiously returning to something like normal. The drive back was a little more optimistic, passing through the island’s famous tunnels — I believe they're called Túneles de la Cumbre — piercing through the central mountains, linking the wetter east to the drier, sunnier west. It’s a bit like driving from one island to another in the space of five minutes.
But before heading home, we made an impromptu stop at Playa de Tazacorte — a black-sand beach on the island’s west coast. The sea, though moody, was calm enough to tempt us in. We stripped down and dove into the Atlantic, swimming under moody grey skies with jagged cliffs rising all around us. The sand here is volcanic, fine and jet black — strange at first underfoot, but warm and soft once you surrender to it.
Swimming there, with the weight of the morning’s volcanic devastation still lingering in our minds, felt weirdly cathartic. The ocean didn’t care. The island was still breathing.
Back at The Treehouse, the emotional weight of the day gave way to a different kind of haze. We opened another bottle of Teneguía, cranked up some more fuzzed-out punk rock, and got... well, fairly drunk under the stars. It felt necessary — a toast to the resilience of this little island and its people, and maybe a way to process the weird emotional cocktail of awe, grief, and admiration I’d just experienced.
Tomorrow, we hike — and maybe, just maybe, I’ll finally learn how to say una cerveza más without sounding like a total tourist.
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