Canary Islands, Winter 2023-2024

The four archipelagos in the Atlantic west of North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula are collectively known as Macaronesia. Yes, that’s spelled correctly – kind of like macaroni. Honestly, for the longest time I thought they were called Macronesia, meaning large, as opposed to Micronesia in the Pacific, which is named as such because of the smallness of those islands. One of those four archipelagos, Cabo Verde, is a fully independent country. The other three are full parts of the nations of Spain and Portugal with a status akin to Hawaii’s in the United States. I have previously been to the two archipelagos that are Portuguese territory – Madeira in 2015 and the Azores in 2016. I loved Madeira and mainland Portugal enough to want to go back and explore the Azores the following year. So on this trip I am heading to the other two archipelagos, the Canary Islands and Cabo Verde. I picked them because they are good year round destinations, the Canaries moderately warm in winter and Cabe Verde in its cooler, drier season. It got to -45* last year in my part of Montana, so it seems like a good idea to try to escape for at least part of the winter. In retrospect, it seems kind of silly to combine both archipelagos into one trip. They are really not that close to each other, and to get from one to the other I have to fly back to continental Europe. In the Canaries I will be on my own for nearly the first three weeks, first for a week in a timeshare trade on Gran Canaria, followed by a few days on Fuerteventura, nearly a week on Lanzarote, and a few days on Tenerife before joining a tour. Then it is two weeks on trekking oriented tours on the islands of Tenerife and La Gomera with KE Adventure, a British tour company I traveled with once before in Guatemala that specializes in trekking trips. Altogether, I will have gone to five of the seven main islands in the Canaries. The next part of the trip will be another twelve day tour with KE Adventure in Cabo Verde, the independent nation west of Senegal that used to be a Portuguese colony. Like the Canaries, the origin of the landmass is volcanic, and the scenery is supposedly spectacular. This will be the first part of a trip that ends with nearly a month in continental Europe, but I’m putting that part of my travels in a separate blog. It’s a long story about finding reasonably-priced airfares I’ll explain in one of my blog entries, but I’ll be flying first to Zurich and then have a few days in Barcelona before getting to the Canary Islands.

Planned Dates

2023-12-11 to 2024-01-20

Countries

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