The smallest and most westerly of the seven main Canary Islands, El Hierro is young, in geological terms – a mere 1.2 million years old – and its volcanic landscape is far less lush than those of its nearest neighbours, La Palma and La Gomera, said Ben Ross in The Telegraph.
Still, if “bleakly fascinating” sounds appealing, and you’re fit enough to handle some quite steep paths, the island makes for “wonderful” hiking. El Hierro is sparsely populated and has no international airport – most visitors arrive by ferry or on a small plane from Tenerife – and while Tenerife welcomed seven million visitors in 2024, El Hierro saw just 26,000, the vast majority of whom were Spanish. I visited on a week-long, self-guided walking tour with Inntravel, which includes accommodation – at, among other places, the island’s state-run Parador and the Balneario Pozo de la Salud, a “delightful” small seaside hotel.
The most “impressive” hike took us (in seven hours) from El Mocanal to La Frontera, and granted “epic” views of the El Golfo plains and the caldera of the Fireba volcano, where clouds “pour over the spine of the island in waves”. El Hierro’s peaks rise to 1,501 metres and the microclimates on their upper slopes sustain contrasting areas of vegetation, including giant heather trees, pine forests and plantations of prickly pears. More striking still, however, is the grove of twisted junipers “crouched” like abstract sculptures on the hillside above the isolated village of Sabinosa.
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Each day we came across “new peculiarities”, including tracks where the rock “swirled with molten shapes like hot toffee”, and the badlands of the Punta de la Dehesa, a “brutal” landscape formed by an eruption in 1793. And although the island’s “giant” lizards were slightly disappointing (they grow to only 70cm long), encounters with flocks of canaries (“drabber” than their captive cousins, but just as “charming”) made up for that.
The trip costs from £820pp, excluding flights (inntravel.co.uk).