Mampa was tired this morning from yesterday’s walk and so we chose to do a more gentle stroll today.

We drove up into the mountains to a hotel called the Parador which is just across the road from the highest mountain in Spain. (Tenerife is an island which like Majorca is part of Spain). It’s huge! Much, much bigger than any mountain in our country.

That’s what it looks like from the hotel Parador.

We didn’t climb up it today, in fact not many people do. Instead they take a cable car ride which drops them off hear to the top. The mountain is so high that there is much less oxygen in the air at the top of the mountain than in air closer to the ground like Oxford. In fact mampa and I noticed straight away that it was harder to breathe when we got to the Parador than at our hotel which was much closer to the sea.

Because there is so little oxygen, it is much harder to make your muscles move (because they need oxygen to work properly) and climbing up a high mountain is really very hard.

But today’s walk was much more gentle and we walked around some smaller mountains rather than climb them. But the views were incredible.

One day perhaps we’ll come back here with you two and take you up into the mountains and you can see for yourselves just how amazing it is.

Here’s a photo of some rocks – there is a teenager climbing one of them – can you see him?

You’ll have to expand the photo quite a bit but he’s there 🌝.

Mampa had asked the hotel we’re staying in to make us a picnic so they did and we ate it sitting quietly in a peaceful spot away from any other walkers. Because it’s January there aren’t many other people here so walking is lovely. There’s no noise and no sounds except birds and today there was absolutely nothing, not even bird song.

The volcanoes on Tenerife are still active. There was a big eruption in 1492 which Christopher Columbus saw when he was on his way to discover America – though now we know that the Vikings discovered it first. There were more in 1705 and the last big one was 100 years ago in 1909, shortly after my grandmother was born. There will be more in the future.

The rock formations made by the eruptions and wind and rain are astonishing.

You can see how easy the path was today and so that you can see that I’m really here too.

I’m nearly as tall as the mountain 😉

Here’s a panorama of some strange rock formations.

Finally here’s a picture of mampa making her weary way back to the Parador.

After we got back to the car, we drove to the sea and had a fantastic late lunch in a small tapas bar before driving back to our hotel through the clouds and back up into the mountains above the clouds. The last picture shows what that looked like.

Night, night

💕