Black rock, white salt

This island could be called Germany-on-sea. Almost everyone we meet or overhear is German. And like us they are mostly retired. Some of the women are notable - solo, sturdy, a bit dumpy and frowsty, faintly aggressive. This last quality often turns out to be shyness, as they will usually return a smile after a moment or two of uncertainty. It all makes me feel I should go back to school and learn to speak German a bit more fluently instead of my very limited shruggy apologies for not being able to chat with them.

We made two main expeditions yesterday - one to the very new volcano of St Antony, which appeared near the southern tip of the island in 1977. The crater is about 300m across and already - astonishingly - has a grove of young Canary pines growing in it, probably where water congregates. I love these trees, and have failed many times to germinate them at home. They form the most beautiful shapes, have long elegant and rather jaunty needles which are blueish in youth, turning to a dark fragrant green in maturity. The wood is strong and is somewhat fire-resistant - a handy quality when you grow on the flanks of active volcanoes.

The rim of the volcano is formed into a clinker path, with the mysterious terrifying vent down to your left and a stupendous view sweeping right up the west coast to your right. It's all quiet now. No heat just there, though a hot spring was rediscovered in 2005 down by the sea. We were lucky that the clouds were above us and the sky was clear.  Hang-gliders swooped over us.  Beneath the hill, vineyards with tiny ground-hugging twiggy vines are spread out (Malmsey wine), and then the banana fields swathed in their coverings of tightly-stretched taupe-coloured mesh, which protect them from the damaging wind.  It's absolutely clear how effective these meshes are - the plants under cover have huge undamaged leaves, as big as - what? - duvet covers, maybe, while the groves outside have their leaves all shredded into fingers and tatters. These tears all set back the growth of the fruits which are really quite delicate despite their robust appearance. Every penny, every blemish counts.

Walking along the path, we found that although sandals are perfectly adequate to manage the surface, the dust and cinders quickly insinuate themselves under your feet and you have keep stopping to shake your shoes out.

We met a couple of women along the path who struck up conversation having seen us somewhere else. They could have been sisters but one was Gerrman and the other from Ipswich, and they live in Düsseldorf. They drove from Germany down to the south of Spain, took the ferry to Tenerife and are on a 3-month stay, and wondered at our brief one-week visit.

Back up at the pretty little town of Fuencaliente (Hotspring), we queued for lunch in a working cafe and there met another German lady - not really to speak to, you understand, but to nod with and smile.   The press of people round the bar was exciting. The man serving paella and cleaning up made a couple of spectacular drinks called 'paraquitos' for someone, layered coffee+liqueur drinks in glass cups, handed gently to the customer who wobbled away to take them to his table outside.

Then for our second expedition we took the road down towards the real tip of the island, seemingly driving forever through the newest lavafields with their huge blackened apocalyptic contortions and massive gritty horror, down to las Salinas, where some enterprising character decided to set up a salt-works. This - and the two adjoining lighthouses - were quite miraculously spared from the lava which rolled past them within a few inches in some cases. The salt is dried in a series of about fifty or sixty rectangular pans, about the size of your average front garden. Here over a few weeks the sun and wind takes the water away and the pure white salt is scraped and piled and then packed and taken away.  Amazingly, in this ferociously hostile environment, two primitive bacteria like to live, Cyanobacteria and Archaeobacteria, and a goofy 'portrait' of one of these is made into keyrings and badges and stickers and sold in the shop.  More interesting was watching the two taciturn men shovelling the salt in the packing house, seeing it augered up into a small hopper, and then filled into kilo bags... One shovelled and one packed the bags into bigger packs and then stacking these on a pallet. They do 600 tonnes a year.

The drive back was along the coast road again, where they are straightening the road out in a series of chops and relevelling operations. At each section of the works two men wielding a circular blue/red table-tennis bat control the flow of traffic, and this goes on for some miles, smoothly enough. It gives you enough time to admire the delicacy and accuracy of the engineering, the beauty of their new stone retaining wall, and to try to see new baby Canary-pine tree seedlings which have propagated themselves in the hard sloping gritty dusty soil.   Why oh why cannot I get them to do this at home?