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Vines planted in volcanic ash on Lanzarote
Atlantic Island
Hopping
Paddy Dillon looks back on twenty years of walking and writing...
L
et’s do some number crunching. I
might have had second thoughts,
twenty years ago, if someone had
asked me to take responsibility for
twenty-one subtropical islands dotted
around 2,000,000 square kilometres
of the Atlantic Ocean. Fortunately,
my involvement came just one or two
islands at a time. It all began with a
simple comment at the Cicerone office.
‘People keep asking for our
guidebook to Madeira. We don’t have
one, so we need one.’
I always say that I only have two
speciality areas - places I know really
well and places I don’t know at all.
Madeira fell into the latter category. An
initial study of a map revealed a small
island in the Atlantic, under the control
of Portugal, yet over 1,000 kilometres
offshore. I thought a month would be
adequate for the route research, but
I was wrong and I needed to make a
second visit in order to do the island
justice. As my second departure date
loomed, another throwaway comment
was made in the Cicerone office.
‘If you get a chance to nip over
to the Canary Islands, see if it would
stand a guidebook or two.’
6 Outdoor focus | spring 2020
My initial
forced landing
offered me hazy
views of four of the
islands to fire my
imagination...
One doesn’t ‘nip’ between islands
that are 500 kilometres apart, but
by some curious coincidence fate
intervened. My flight to Madeira was
thwarted by bad weather just before
landing and my pilot went to look
for another airport. That’s how I
discovered the Canary Islands and I
enjoyed splendid aerial views of the
mighty peak of El Teide on Tenerife.
Looking at maps of endless ocean, it
seemed that the Canary Islands were
over 1,000 kilometres from Spain,
but one of the islands was barely 100
kilometres from the arid Saharan coast
of Africa.
The Canary Islands comprise of
seven main islands, with a couple
more small inhabited islands, all under
Spanish control. My initial forced
landing offered me hazy views of four
of the islands to fire my imagination.
Back at the Cicerone office it was
decided that two guidebooks might
be enough to cover the Canaries, with
four main islands in one and three
main islands, plus two small ones,
in the other. The route research was
fairly difficult as very few paths were
signposted, though the landscape and