Las Palmas 1

No hurry to go anywhere so I slept in. I had all day to explore Las Palmas. It's a working Spanish city, not a tourist resort. The temperature was a perfect 24C with cool breezes.

The sights of Las Palmas are scattered across several kilometres north-south, and the guide book had to represent the city on two maps. On my walk to the cultural centre of the city, Plaza Santa Ana, about 3 or 4 km from where I was staying, I passed Parque Doramas, which has a small collection of Canarian flora.

Colourful flower bed.

Cacti. There will be more pictures from the botanical garden later.

Sparkling fountain.

Near perfect rose.

Plaza de Santa Ana.

The Casa Colón museum. This had informative displays on his journeys. I didn't think much of the contents of the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, so I have no recollection of what I saw.

A pair of very colourful macaws playing in the courtyard of Casa Colón.

I looked in on a couple of markets, the covered market and the market at Vergueta. Strawberries were expensive, but bananas were cheap, of course. I tried a gofio ice cream. Gofio is a Canarian specialty, a flour made of roasted grains which can be eaten as is for a snack. The ice cream had a slightly burnt taste, not unpleasant, and certainly no weirder than the black sesame ice cream found in Asia. I tried to buy some Gofio in a supermarket but didn't find any.

In the evening I walked through El Muelle (The Wharf), which served as a multistorey shopping centre and, er, wharf. I bought a ticket for my next ferry sailing. There were international stores there, including Quiksilver. Canarians looked relatively prosperous. I suppose this may be because the rich gravitate to pleasant climes. However being a medium sized Spanish city, Las Palmas has the usual problems with drug addicts and illegal immigrants.

I watched a ferry for a while, then walked back to Playa de las Canteras to view the sunset before calling it an evening. As luck would have it, there was a glorious sunset but I had no camera with me.