The island went quiet two million years ago. Nobody can tell you why.

The cloud came down to meet the road. One minute the taxi was in sunshine with the sea behind it; the next, the sky had become a low grey lid and the hillside beside the window had turned red — the dark wine-red of old volcanic rock — and on it, among the boulders and the yellow-flowering scrub, sheep were grazing. Long-fleeced, unhurried, nobody in sight with them. They did not look up.

It is the kind of moment people call mystical, and we understand why. But the truer word is old. Everything in that frame, the red rock, the fog, the animals and even the way nobody was watching them, is something this island has been doing for a very long time.

An island that stopped

La Gomera is not a volcano. It is what is left of volcanoes. The oldest lava on dry land here is ten to eleven million years old, laid over a submarine base that is older still. The last building phase began about five million years ago and ended about two million years ago, and in the words of the island’s conservation planners, at that moment all internal activity ceased. It is the only island in the Canaries with no volcanic activity at all in the last two million years. Tenerife, across the strait, erupted in 1909. La Palma erupted in 2021. La Gomera simply stopped.

Nobody can fully tell you why. The favoured explanation for how the Canary Islands formed, a plume of heat rising under the ocean floor, struggles with it; the Institute of Geosciences in Madrid has said publicly that the model could not explain the absence of volcanism on La Gomera in the last two million years. The mystery here is not a spirit. It is a gap in the science, and a real one.

What has happened instead, for two million years, is weather. Rain and gravity have been taking the island apart, cutting the barrancos that divide it into separate worlds and carrying the rock down into the sea. The drama of this landscape was not made by fire. It was made by water, working patiently on what the fire left behind.

The needles

The strangest shapes on the island are the roques: towers of pale rock standing up out of the ridges as if something had pushed them through from underneath. Something did. The tourist version says they are old volcanic chimneys, lava that set in a volcano’s throat and was left standing when the cone wore away. The geologists who have studied them describe something different: needle domes of trachyte and phonolite, lava so thick it came up nearly solid and set where it rose, cracking as it grew.

The most famous is the Roque de Agando, about 1,250 metres high by most counts. It is the only one anyone has managed to date, at 4.28 million years. People worshipped on it. There were at least two altars on its summit, and in the 1980s they were badly damaged — dug up, according to the island’s own conservation plan, by a German association that described itself as doing research while filming for German television. The footage was sold as a documentary.

The altars are real. So is the market for mystery. The second has done real damage to the first.

The forest drinks the cloud

Above the road, inside that grey lid, is Garajonay. We did not go into the forest on this drive; from the taxi it was only cloud. But the cloud is the forest’s whole secret.

The trade winds push damp air against the island from the north-east. Warmer air above stops it rising, so it settles on the high ridges as fog, and the fog, moving through the trees, condenses on every leaf and drips to the ground. Scientists call it horizontal precipitation. At one study site in the park, measured over two years in the early 2000s by Axel Ritter, Carlos Regalado and colleagues, fog added between a fifth and nearly half as much water again as the rain. In July 2019 the summit gauges caught, on average, seventy-two litres a square metre from fog, against four from rain.

The part that matters most is this. Ángel Fernández, who directed the park, and the fog researcher Luis Gómez González measured the water reaching the ground under the trees. Under mature heather forest it was nearly one and a half times what fell in the open. Under degraded forest it was barely a third. A healthy forest makes water. A damaged one does not. That is not a metaphor about balance. It is a measurement, and it is why what happened in 2012 mattered so much.

You will read almost everywhere that this is a Tertiary forest, unchanged since the subtropical woods that covered southern Europe millions of years ago. The science is less tidy. A genetic study published in 2015 found that these forests were largely assembled more recently, from species arriving from elsewhere, rather than surviving intact from the deep past. Fernández himself put it carefully: the Canarian laurel forest is, in part, an exceptional refuge. In part. We would rather tell you that than the brochure.

August 2012

On 4 August 2012 a fire started that was not declared out until 30 October. It burned 3,617 hectares, nearly a tenth of the island, and 741 hectares inside the national park, almost a fifth of it. It had been set deliberately, after around thirty earlier attempts that summer. More than five thousand people left their homes, about a quarter of the island’s population, and more than nine hundred were taken out of Valle Gran Rey by boat overnight. Nobody died.

Fernández did not soften it afterwards. The losses are irreversible, he said, and there are species that have not sprouted again since the fire. His team found that the burned forest did not simply grow back as itself; seedlings were scarce, and the vegetation shifted towards more flammable scrub, a change they expect to last for decades. An EU-funded restoration project, LIFE+ Garajonay Vive, planted around sixty thousand native plants across 189 hectares between 2014 and 2018.

He has said one other thing, which belongs on a page about mystery more than anything else here: the only cause of fire on La Gomera is people, and people alone.

The altars on the summits

Long before any of this, people climbed to the high points of La Gomera to burn animals for their gods. On the summit of Garajonay itself, archaeologists have excavated sacrificial altars dating from the seventh to the twelfth centuries; only domestic animals were burned there, and the site is described as a sacred place for the island’s pre-Hispanic people. There are two altars on La Zarcita, with burned sheep and goat bone. There are about twenty-five on the Fortaleza de Chipude, the great flat-topped mountain in the south-west, a place of which the archaeologist Juan Francisco Navarro Mederos has said that no Gomero, and probably no Canarian, stays unmoved by it.

The practice did not end with the conquest. In 1774 a priest, José Fernández Prieto Salazar, wrote in a parish report that people went up the Fortaleza to perform exorcisms when there were plagues; that he had been up five or six times himself; and that on the flat top it served for kids and lambs. Juan Carlos Hernández, director of La Gomera’s archaeological museum, reads it as evidence that the Gomeros were still going up to burn animals there, nearly three hundred years after Castile took the island.

We thought of that line on the red slope, in the fog, with the sheep grazing and nobody watching them.

The love story that is not old

Every visitor to La Gomera is told the story of Gara and Jonay. Gara, a princess of Agulo; Jonay, a young man who swam over from Tenerife on inflated goatskins; families who forbade it; the lovers fleeing to the summit and dying together on a single stick of laurel sharpened at both ends; and the mountain named Garajonay after them.

It is a beautiful story, and it is not ancient. The earliest written version anyone has traced comes from the twentieth century: a piece by the Puerto de la Cruz chronicler Francisco Pedro Montes de Oca, writing as the Barón de Imobach, in the Gaceta de Tenerife in 1924, though the writer Juan Carlos Saavedra points instead to Juan Álvarez Delgado in 1943. The 1924 version is not even the same story: no princess of Agulo, no swimmer from Tenerife. Those details arrived later, from hands nobody has identified. Saavedra argues that the names Gara and Jonay were invented from the place name, rather than the place being named after them.

None of that makes it worthless. The philologist Maximiano Trapero, who collected spoken versions of it, still called it the most beautiful of legends, and noticed that the goatskin swim turns up in material gathered by a Tenerife doctor in the late nineteenth century. Trapero also wrote the sentence we would put over the door of any museum in the Canaries: the distance from history to legend is an abyss.

Where the island feeds you

If there is anything mystical in the interior of La Gomera, we think it lives in a kitchen in Las Hayas.

Efigenia Borges, born in Arure, began with a small shop selling sandals, rice, salt and paraffin, and a glass of wine with a plate of gofio and chopped cheese. It became Casa Efigenia, known across the Canaries for a watercress stew thickened with gofio and for having no meat or fish on the menu long before that was anybody’s idea of fashion. In May 2025 the Canarian government presented her with its gold medal. Her son, Sergio Méndez, runs it now.

Her rule was one sentence long. Here we don’t distinguish between anyone, she said, and if someone has no money to eat, we feed them anyway.

We did not eat there on this trip; we were in a taxi and the cloud was down. It is the first place we will go back for.

So that is the mystery of La Gomera, as far as we can honestly take it. An island that stopped erupting for reasons science cannot yet explain. A forest that makes its own rain, until people burn it. Altars on the summits that a priest was still writing about in 1774 and a television crew dug up in the 1980s. A love story younger than the island’s first roads. And a woman in a mountain village who fed people whether or not they could pay. The cloud is real. The rest is people. It always was.