The silent island — Garajonay cloud forest, the silbo whistled language, and the Canary island Columbus stopped at before sailing into the unknown
La Gomera is the second-smallest of the inhabited Canary Islands — a near-circular volcanic island of 370km² with an ancient laurisilva cloud forest at its centre (Garajonay National Park, UNESCO World Heritage) and one of the world's most extraordinary communication systems: El Silbo, a whistle language replacing Castilian Spanish phonemes with two fingers and two tones, allowing communication across the island's deep ravines at distances up to 3km. The island has no airport — access is exclusively by ferry from Tenerife — which has kept mass tourism away while absorbing it next door.
La Gomera's Guanche people were conquered by Hernán Peraza in 1445–1450. Columbus stopped at La Gomera — specifically at San Sebastián de La Gomera — on all four of his transatlantic voyages, using the island as his final Atlantic provisioning stop before the ocean crossing. The Torre del Conde (Tower of the Count, 1450) in San Sebastián is the only surviving pre-Spanish-conquest fortification in the Canary Islands. El Silbo predates the Spanish conquest and was adapted to carry Spanish phonemes after contact; it declined with modern telecommunications but was revived in the 1990s and became…