What's on in La Palma

La Palma is the Canaries' green northwest outlier, nicknamed "la isla bonita" — the pretty island — and it's the most dramatically vertical of them all. A huge volcanic crater, the Caldera de Taburiente, gapes at its centre, ringed by pine forest and ridge walks, while banana terraces tumble down to the coast and the colonial streets of Santa Cruz de la Palma line the harbour. The 2021 Cumbre Vieja eruption left fresh lava fields above Tazacorte that you can now visit. Above all this sit some of the clearest skies on Earth: La Palma is a designated Starlight Reserve, and the observatory crowns the island.

The fiesta calendar is rich and very local. June is busy with village patron-saint fiestas — San Antonio del Monte and San Antonio de Padua among them, with their paellas, folk concerts and timple music — alongside farmers' markets and craft fairs. Later in the summer the Fiesta de San Roque and the Tazacorte gastronomy festivals carry on the tradition. La Palma's most spectacular event, the Bajada de la Virgen de las Nieves with its famous dancing dwarves, is a once-every-five-years affair, so check the cycle before building a trip around it.

La Palma (SPC) airport on the east coast takes some direct UK flights, plus easy connections via Tenerife and Gran Canaria. A hire car is more or less essential here — the island is all mountain switchbacks, and the caldera viewpoints, the lava fields, the banana-coast villages and the stargazing spots up top simply aren't reachable any other way.

Whether you're in a Los Cancajos apartment, a Santa Cruz hotel or a rural casa among the bananas, this is your guide to what's actually on while you're here — the village fiestas, folk nights and stargazing worth planning around.