A short post from the travelogue series covering our cruise on Ventura to the Canary Islands in 2021. The photos here are from a couple of reasonably short stops we made after visiting Timanfaya National Park on Lanzarote and on the route back to the port at Arrecife; the first was to a museum dedicated to Aloe Vera, and the second was to a vineyard and bodega. There isn’t a lot to say about either of these stops, and they certainly weren’t the main reason for us picking this cruise excursion, but they were fairly interesting, nonetheless.
First up was the Aloe Vera Museum, located in the small town of Yaiza on the southern edge of Timanfaya National Park. I won’t lie; we weren’t expecting much other than a sales pitch here, but the museum – which is free to enter – put on a demonstration of cutting the plants and showing off the natural aloe vera goo (I think that’s the technical term) as well as rubbing it into arms of anyone who showed an interest in having goo on their arms. As I mentioned, fairly interesting, and surprisingly so, and enough that we did take a look to see what sort of aloe vera products they might have for sale. The answer was a lot, but nothing caught our eyes enough to part with money. That’s not true for others on our tour who ended up wandering back to the bus with bags of stuff. It’s always nice to see cruise groups contributing to the economy of places they visit.
Of more interest to us was the vineyard, or the Lanzarote equivalent of a vineyard, of Bodega La Geria. Circular depression in the volcanic ash and soil, or areas surrounded by low, circular walls protect the vines of a number of varieties of local grapes, the most prevalent of which is the Malvasía Volcánica. The elevation, underground heat, protection from the worst of the wind, and the cool Atlantic breeze make for a versatile and unique grape, and for some sweet wines. A little too sweet for our tastes, if I’m being honest, and we’re red fans rather than white anyway, but it was lovely to see how the wine was made here.
These two short visits concluded our half-day excursion on Lanzarote so that all that remained would be to head back to Arrecife where Ventura was docked and to head off to the next island, due to be Madeira. That was the plan, but the plan was about to get torn up and scattered, and you can read about that in the next post in this series.