We headed to our last island: đź“ŤGran Canaria, the third-largest and second-most-populous island of the Canaries. The crossing from đź“ŤMorro Jable to đź“ŤLas Palmas was around two hours long on a slightly larger boat than our previous crossing, a trimaran.
We kept our plans very loose as our boat departed at noon and our apartment check-in was at 16:00. It wasn’t a bad thing as we discovered that Las Palmas is a slightly bigger city and walking from the port to our apartment took almost an hour. Granted we detoured a little bit to follow the beach instead of meandering the streets but it added 10 minutes to the journey. We sat down at a 📍helados bar (gelato for us mere mortals) for the remaining hour and waited for our host to arrive. As you can see a very busy schedule: sit for two hours, walk an hour, sit for another hour, get up and meet our host to get the keys to our apartment.
The thing is, as soon as we met our host he started telling us how unusually warm the weather is. I’ll grant him that the average high temperature for September should be around 24°C, not the 30-32°C we’ve been enjoying for the past two weeks. An average of 6°C above normal didn’t seem like such a big deal to us but he kept talking about it. It’s once we were in the apartment it downed on us that it didn’t have AC. It was warmer inside than outside. Our host kept us entertained for the next couple of minutes and left us with instructions on where to park our car.
We immediately looked at the listing and, yep, right it front of us, the listing does not mention having AC. We missed that one. It does get cooler at night but with the flat warmer than the outside it didn’t bode well for us. Within 5 minutes we were looking at available listing in the area. Within 15 minutes we had booked a hotel up the beach. We’ll be using our current none-refundable booking as a very exclusive laundromat and parking.
The 20-minute walk to the hotel along the beach wasn’t too bad but we started to look forward to not carrying our backpack everywhere. We even managed to get a room with a good shower and, most importantly, A double bed (no twins that are so frequent in Europe). Happy with our catch, we headed out to visit the local castle, 📍Castillo de la Luz, before it closed.
Originally a built as a wooden fort, the castle was rebuilt a number of times. Its current exterior dates back to the 17th century. It kept a defensive roles until the 19th century. Abandoned for many decades, restoration started in 1969, incorporating new elements, an exterior moat and new arches. Even if they added a moat, its purpose would not be military but cultural. It was restored a second time in 1998 with a focus on showcasing as much of the older structure as possible. Finally a new vocation was given to it in 2015 and kept it to this day. It became the home of the MartĂn Chirino Foundation of Art and Thought. As such, other than the structure, we were treated to art from Martin Chirino. A contemporary of Manrique and Picasso, the man had skills and loved his spirals. The space really brings his art out. We thoroughly enjoyed our visit.