Climate - Ressources - Culture - Histoire - Nature - Garajonay National Park - Protected areas
Fauna - Flora - Geology - Silbo Gomero

 

The park has been declared Patrimony of the Humanity in 1986 by the UNESCO

The Garajonay National Park offers the visitor the possibility of enjoying various forest environments. often enveloped in a humid fog which sustains the rich plant life and nourishes small streams which spring from the very edge of the arid land. Here it is still possible to find Nature in pristine conditions, evolving even as it recovers its very essence.

The central peaks of La Gomera, often enveloped in fog, are home to a fascinating, luscious rain forest, whose permanent greenery is frequently imbibed with mist, and contrasts sharply with the aridity of the coast and lower zones of the island.

This vegetable growth is denominated laurisilva, alluding to the greater part of the ample variety of arboreal species found here whose leaves are similar to those of the laurel tree.
This type of leaf is an indication of its adaptation to the humid subtropical environment and mild temperature typical of the misty zones on the cliff of the north in the Canary islands, where the laurel forest flourishes.

The Canarian laurel forest has sparked enormous scientific interest, because the greater part of both the animal and vegetable species there are indigenous of the island and are found nowhere else on earth.

Moreover, fossils have shown that some of these species were already alive in the subtropical forests that covered the Mediterranean area millions of years ago and that disappeared from the continent during the age of the glaciers. The laurel forest is, therefore, an authentic living fossil, a relic of former geological ages.

Destroyed and transformed for the most part by centuries of intense exploitation, the most remarkable of the enclaves of Canarian laurisilva are now protected, the outstanding example being the Garajonay National Park, considered the most extensive and best conserved of this type of ecosystem in all of the archipelago.

Descargar la guía del Parque de Garajonay