Port of Call: Three Days in San Sebastián de La Gomera, the Island's Only Real Town

The gangway drops and for about eleven minutes San Sebastián de La Gomera is the busiest place in the Canaries. Hikers with poles lashed to their packs. A scrum of rental cars nosing off the ramp, indicators blinking. Somebody's name shouted across the quay. Then the ferry reverses out towards Los Cristianos, the harbour goes quiet again, and the town resumes its own business. This is La Gomera's only real town — a working port, a 15th-century tower that outlasted the Conquest, and a pedestrian street where Columbus is said to have taken on water before his second voyage. It is not a resort. It is where the island actually lives, which is precisely the point.

What San Sebastián de La Gomera is known for

Ask anywhere else in Spain and the answer comes back the same: this is the Columbus town. Tradition holds that Christopher Columbus stopped here in 1492, in 1493 and again in 1498 to take on water and supplies before pointing his ships at the Atlantic, and the old town has kept two small sites built around that story. The Casa de Colón sits on Calle Real, on the spot where he is said to have lodged; the Casa de la Aguada carries the watering itself in its name. Neither is a grand museum, and neither pretends to be. The Casa de Colón is a modest townhouse with a Chimú pottery gallery upstairs — a quiet, slightly unexpected room of Peruvian ceramics that sends you back out onto the street thinking about how far the Atlantic traffic actually went in both directions.

What the brochures undersell is the other thing San Sebastián is known for, which is simply being a port town rather than a beach town. Fred Olsen and Balearia boats from Los Cristianos dock every couple of hours, and that rhythm sets the pace of everything: gangways down, the brief surge, then stillness. Up from the marina, Calle Real runs as the pedestrian spine of the whole place. The sand, for the record, is modest black volcanic shingle. If you came for a beach holiday you came to the wrong harbour. If you came because you want a working market, Spanish-only tascas and a Gothic fortress inside a ten-minute walk of each other, you are exactly where you should be.

Where to eat and drink

Order the fish. It comes off the boats in the harbour, it is almost always grilled, and it arrives with lapas — limpets, prised from the rocks, eaten with a flick of lemon and a certain amount of commitment. Before any of it lands, though, bread arrives with almogrote: the spicy cured-cheese, oil and pepper spread that originated here on La Gomera and now turns up free on practically every table in town. It is salty, insistent, faintly agricultural, and it will ruin you for ordinary butter.

For the serious dinner, Inta Las Brenas is consistently the highest-rated kitchen in town and earns it with volume as much as finesse — a generous Canarian grill where the ribeye is the kind of plate two people eye warily and then finish, where the octopus comes fried, and where roast goat's cheese arrives under mojo. Go hungry and don't over-order starters.

Lunch wants a different gear. Bar Terraza Ambigú spreads its shaded terrace across the Plaza de las Américas, which is the correct place to be at two in the afternoon with a coffee, a barbecue plate and no onward plans for an hour or so. It is one of those terraces that quietly absorbs your entire afternoon, and I'd argue that's a feature.

On Calle Real, Gastrobar La Salamandra has been running out of its townhouse since 2007, half gastrobar and half heladería, and these days the homemade ice cream is at least as much of a draw as the menu. Two scoops after a walk up from the port is a reasonable use of a euro or two and a very reasonable use of a bench.

The Mercado Municipal is where to go if you want to understand what the island actually produces rather than what restaurants do with it. Gomeran goat's cheese, palm honey, local fruit and vegetables under one indoor roof — this is the shopping trip that later becomes a picnic halfway up a trail in Garajonay.

Nightlife

There isn't any, and that is a fair trade. San Sebastián has no club scene, no late strip, nothing that could be described as a crawl. Evenings here are a long tapas dinner and a drink in a plaza, which is a different pleasure and arguably a better one.

The Plaza de la Constitución is the focal point once the last ferry has come in. Tasca Las Cruces 2 opens Wednesday to Monday from 7pm to midnight, keeps its menu in Spanish, and takes cash only — bring notes and bring a little patience with the language, because the reward is a room full of people who live here. It gets busiest right after the evening boat docks, when the day's arrivals and the day's locals briefly share the same bar.

If you'd rather stay put, Bar Terraza Ambigú carries straight from lunch into an easy evening drink on the Plaza de las Américas, with none of the effort of relocating. By eleven the streets have gone soft and quiet, and you will be glad of it at seven the next morning when the trailhead calls.

Things to do

Start on Calle Real and walk up. The pedestrian street runs from the harbour to the church square, and along it the Casa de Colón and the Casa de la Aguada sit close enough that you can do both — both small, both free or near enough — in under an hour combined. That is the single most efficient hour of history on the island.

Then the Torre del Conde, a short walk off, standing in its own park with the grass and the palms around it. It is a 15th-century Gothic tower and the only one of its kind still standing in the Canaries, squat and square and weirdly domestic in scale until you remember what it was built to survive. Walking around it is free. Do it in the late afternoon when the stone goes the colour of wet clay.

For saltwater, skip the main town beach and take the tunnel from the port through to Playa de la Cueva — sheltered, black-sanded, consistently quieter than the strip in front of town. The walk through the rock is half the appeal; you go in from a working harbour and come out somewhere that feels borrowed from a different island.

Most people, though, are here as a staging post for Garajonay National Park and the laurel forest above — a damp, mossy, prehistoric-feeling woodland that is the real reason La Gomera is on anyone's list. San Sebastián is where you sleep, eat and buy the cheese before you go up.

Shopping

Calle Real is the shopping street, and what saves it is that it runs on local products rather than fridge magnets. The anchor is the Centro de Interpretación de la Miel de Palma at Calle Real 32, in the Casa Bencomo — part small visitor centre, part shop, entirely devoted to Gomeran palm honey. The syrup is tapped from Canary Island date palms, dark and smoky and not remotely like bee honey, and the centre exists to explain a craft that is genuinely particular to this island.

Pair a bottle with goat's cheese from the Mercado Municipal and you have the most honest souvenir available here: miel de palma poured over fresh cheese, which is how the island eats dessert.

Where to stay in San Sebastián de La Gomera

Stay on or just off Calle Real, or down around the harbour, and you can walk to everything — the old town, the ferry terminal, both plazas, all inside ten minutes on foot. Hotel Villa Gomera and Hotel Torre del Conde both sit in or near the centre, within a few minutes of that spine, and for a ferry overnight or a hiking base that proximity is worth more than any amount of poolside.

The town's budget feel is mid-range and practical: simple hotel rates, inexpensive grills and tascas, and then one clifftop splurge in the shape of the Parador, which trades walkability for a view and a climb. Pick according to whether you'd rather roll out of bed into the old town or wake up above it.

Getting around

On foot, within town, always. Calle Real, the two plazas, the Torre del Conde and the marina all fall inside a 10–15 minute walk of one another, and there is no version of this town that needs a car to see.

Beyond it, the honest answer changes. Fred Olsen Express and Balearia run frequent crossings to and from Los Cristianos in Tenerife at around 50 minutes, which makes San Sebastián a very easy night at each end of a trip. The GuaguaGomera bus network covers the main towns and the airport — Line 7 handles the run to La Gomera Airport (GMZ), which sits near Alajeró in the south, roughly 40–60 minutes out, so treat it as a journey rather than a transfer. Binter Canarias flies in from Tenerife and Gran Canaria. But the buses don't reach the trailheads or the minor roads into Garajonay, so if the forest is the plan, hire the car.

One caution, and it is not about crime: the town is very safe by any normal measure. The hazards here are the roads — steep, narrow switchbacks, and the climb up to the Parador in particular. Drive them slowly, in daylight if you can, and let the ferry's rhythm set the rest of your pace.