I am 1,300ft up, hiking along a ridge of volcanic rock. The only sound I can hear is the boot-on-gravel crunch of the guide ahead. The air is so thick I feel I’m breathing through an astronaut’s ventilator, a sense enhanced by the otherworldly formations of the landscape between us and the horizon. It is rust-red, crater-filled. I could be on Mars.
Mars? That’s the point of a new hiking weekend in Lanzarote, used by NASA and the European Space Agency for rover experiments and training expeditions for missions to the Red Planet. The launch is timely. Fifty years ago tomorrow, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to set foot on the moon — and Walks Worldwide’s four-day hiking trip is the closest I’ll get to outer space.
The Canary Islands, perhaps, aren’t an obvious location for Martian encounters. It’s my first time on Lanzarote — friends labelled it “Lanza-grotty” when they returned from a boozy holiday a few years ago. Today, the only similarity between Earth and Mars are the alien life-forms leaving the clubs at 5am.
Right now, we’re on our way to Caldera Santa Catalina, one of 100 volcanic cones scattered across Los Volcanes Natural Park and Timanfaya National Park. Ahead, our guide Gilles is on the march, determinedly striding up a coal-black mountainside. His backyard is a geologically perverse landscape overrun with lava flows, moon-like craters and mind-boggling oddities set against a blue backdrop of ocean. Like something from Star Trek, he tells me.
“No eruptions are forecast today, so consider yourself lucky,” he says. “There hasn’t been a major one since the 1700s. But then again, that blew for six whole years.”
We arrive at the top — the path, winding through fig trees and cooled lava, has taken us through canyon-like lava tubes onto a trail leading to a crater wide enough to fit Battlestar Galactica. “This,” Gilles says, “is where we’ll have a picnic. Like chorizo?” Los Volcanes is as much a frontier of Spanish sausage as it is of space and time. In few other places do leading scientists and astronauts-in-training plan space research and replicate missions to Mars. “Spacewalks” are as common as banana boat rides. So, too, robotic rover test drives. Pub talk among scientists is of a return to the moon’s surface by 2024. If you don’t see the romance or ambition in this, I suggest you go home to watch the Clangers.
After my hike, I check into Princesa Yaiza Suite Hotel Resort in Playa Blanca, a huge hacienda with a baffling number of pools, restaurants and rooms, an indoor waterfall and a mini-jungle.
Away from beach towns Arrecife and Puerto del Carmen, Lanzarote is quiet and filled with extraterrestrial magic. I stop at Jameos del Agua, a lava tube created by a 21,000-year-old volcanic eruption, now home to a Michelin-worthy restaurant and concert venue. Next, I reach Mirador del Río, a spaceport-type observatory with a spectacular view of Graciosa, Lanzarote’s satellite sandbar. At the island’s other end, near La Geria, vines grow in volcanic soil, in pits dug into the surface, sprouting muscatel and malvasía grapes. Luke Skywalker’s home planet of Tatooine is palpable, especially with an X-wing fighter pilot’s perspective of the island as you fly over it. But I try not to think about leaving this alien world behind. Instead, my mind brims with visions of Mars. If this is the first step to prepare humans for other planets, count me in.
Details: Lanzarote
Walks Worldwide (walksworldwide.com) offers three nights B&B from £729pp, two sharing, including flights, transfers and guided treks. Doubles at Princesa Yaiza (princesayaiza.com) from £169 B&B. turismolanzarote.com
