The rebirth of Palmitos Park

Was good the first time

I first went to Palmitos Park [1] just over 4 years ago in the company of a female couple who had broke away for a week of passion from a loveless marriage and a hateful mother.

We had such a wonderful day and walking through the park was such an experience, I always wanted to visit again.

The fury of a sacking

Then in July 2007 fires viewable by satellite engulfed forests of Gran Canaria and destroyed about 70% of the park where some of the rare animals also perished.

The fire was an arsonist attack by someone who had been laid off and whilst someone demanded the death penalty for his outrageously heinous and destructive act that caused untold amounts of suffering and huge compensatory bills a more serious matter was ignored.

The fact that in many cases a person’s job is the centre of their stability and sanity, they are humans first, with feelings, responsibilities and concerns which if not properly addressed in the management and administrative desires to streamline, downsize and restructure can lead to irreparable consequences.

Open again for business

The proprietors of Palmitos Park immediately took on the task of rebuilding the park and bringing it back to its former glory with even more to show to amuse, impress and enthral.

The park opened again to the public on the 4^th of August 2008 and I decided I would visit again to see the place and see how it had recovered.

Set in grounds, well, not grounds but a gorge that has been landscaped in a melding of nature and human influence covering about 200,000 square metres, it is mainly a botanical garden and an aviary, but there are mammals, reptiles and fish there too.

Crazy thoughts and amazing results

The best part of an afternoon can easily be spent there, taking you to elevations so high with breath-taking views and then into deep gullies all accessible with properly sign-posted exhibits around the park.

A site is dedicated to how much destruction the park suffered and the regeneration process; all the pictures would be uploaded in due course.

One thing I find most fascinating about this park is that many years ago some mad visionary would have prospected for the land to build the park and the land owners might have thought he should be certified.

I chatted to an older couple there and considered how overwhelmed they would have been if they were presented with all that land on an idyllic island to make the magic of an abode talk less of a tourist attraction of international repute and significance.

Taming the landscape

The Canary Islands are full of crazy ideas of 20 or 30 years ago that have become landmarks of the must-see variety, what these people have done is to combine that quality of genius and imagination with the altruistic goal of conservation and produced these amazing attractions.

Like I have written of before architects are no more afraid to build into the hills, gullies and literally untameable landscape; I think the courage to do these things came from the madness that drove the other men to tame landscapes that once looked like they would remain pristine through to eternity.

If you are ever in Gran Canaria, make Palmitos Park a compulsory destination on your itinerary, even if you did nothing else.

Source

[1] Palmitos Park - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

To Tenerife - Loro Parque

To Tenerife at last

Visiting Tenerife today was a thrill, after all my fuss, it was still a day out to the zoo. The pickup to Agaete where we boarded a ferry was 10 minutes late but I must say that this trip was organised by the same company that cancelled the trip for Tuesday, late on Monday evening.

I would suppose there are empires in that organisation where one excels at incompetence whilst another department strives to make things happen – somehow booking direct and booking through a hotel tour representative can make a whole lot of difference, I still never found out why the tour was cancelled.

At a bearing from 310 degrees we set sail for Santa Cruz de Tenerife and it was all over in just about 70 minutes.

Loro Parque

On disembarking we boarded a bus and headed for Loro Parque on the western side of Tenerife, it was established in 1972 as a parrot aviary but has grown to include a larger variety of animals and it is the home all sorts of endangered or threatened species.

There is such a fascination for watching sea lions and dolphins perform, but we also had the added fun of watching orca whales. When we arrived in the Orca Ocean arena, the cameras zoomed in on me which was beamed out to the big screen with a balloon callout 'bald is beautiful' – I could only wag a finger at the prankster.

Hard entertainment

Sometimes, I wonder what it takes to entertain us. When we watched the Diana Ross tribute performance, each completed song drew polite applause.

A few days later we watched a Chinese acrobatic troupe and as each performance got a bit more difficult we seemed to be less appreciative of the last and were slow to applaud the next.

Imagine, the man was balancing on one end of plank which was placed on top of the round side of a cylinder and was using the principle of levers to flip bowls from the other end of the plank to the top of his head. He did it with three bowls at a time and then a cup and finally flipped a spoon into the cup.

Another performance was the legs of a chair each balanced on 4 beer bottles and the man doing handstands on the back and seat of the chair, he went on to balance another chair unevenly on the first chair and still do handstands but each consequent applause was grudging, I probably initiated the most appreciation for those acts.

A lady spinning tables with her feet on the table edges and obliquely, then going on to spin a colleague on a barrel, really awe-inspiring stuff as far as I was concerned.

Fascinated more by animals

So watching sea lions, then dolphins and finally orca whales do the same acts of jumping out of the water, going through hoops and splashing around, whilst being incentivised through frequent handouts of fish was in no way boring as if humans were to do the same thing, each repeated act still drew increasing applause.

Animals do repetitive things compared to humans doing unique things and we felt better entertained by the animals.

By the time I returned to the hotel, there was great consideration on their part of offer a cold buffet, but as the saying in Yoruba goes, the late night visitor would hardly have choices for the food laid before him – a salad and a bottle of cold water, you could not complain at all.