Garachico is ten minutes west of San Marcos, and locals will tell you it is the most beautiful town in Spain. What makes it genuinely unusual is not the architecture but the reason the architecture survived: the town lost everything three hundred years ago and has been quiet ever since.
The port that was buried
Garachico was founded in 1496 by Cristóbal de Ponte, a Genoese banker, and its natural harbour quickly made it the most important port in the Canary Islands. Through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the malvasía wine of these slopes was shipped from here to Europe and the Americas, and goods came back the other way. It was the richest town on the island.
On 5 May 1706 the Trevejo volcano erupted about eight kilometres above the town. Over the following days seven separate lava flows came down the hillside, through the streets, and into the sea — filling the harbour completely.
The port was gone. The trade went with it, permanently, to Santa Cruz. The Castillo de San Miguel, the small sixteenth-century fort on the shore, is one of the few structures that survived.
What that left behind
A town with no economic reason to redevelop itself. Three hundred years later the old centre is remarkably intact — plazas, convents, wooden balconies, narrow streets — because nothing ever came along with the money to knock them down.
And along the shore, El Caletón: the natural rock pools formed where the lava met the water, now the best swimming in town and among the best on this coast.
You can stand at the pools and see the whole story at once — the flow that ruined the town and made the bathing.
Eating here
This is the reason our hosts send guests west rather than up to Icod. Garachico has the densest concentration of good restaurants within easy reach of the apartment, and we have written about six of them:
- Silogía — the best vegetarian cooking on this coast
- El Rebojo — precise, careful, and the other place to ask for Viña Zanata
- Tasca El Muelle Viejo — by the old quay, tables outside
- Los Pinos — traditional, and a lunch place
- Rocamar — short menu, and the best rabbit on the island
- Bestia Marina — the occasion dinner
Getting there
Ten minutes by car along the coast. It is popular, and the centre gets busy; take the first reasonable parking space on the way in.
You can also walk it in about an hour through the banana terraces, which is the better way to arrive. Our hosts advise against walking back after dark — the route is unlit and passes through a road tunnel. Take the bus, or drive.