The forest drinks from fog, and shepherds have talked in whistles for centuries: what is on the island everyone skips

La Gomera is the second smallest of the Canary Islands and the easiest one to miss. Tenerife is right next door, loud and crowded, and the ferry between the two runs several times a day. That is exactly why La Gomera has stayed what the other islands no longer are - a place where there is nothing much to do, and that is the point.

The centre of the island is held by the Garajonay National Park, protected as a UNESCO biosphere reserve. What grows inside is laurisilva - a damp, fog-fed forest that existed at these latitudes even before the ice age. Laurel, til, ivy and faya, trunks wrapped in moss, ferns up to your knees and fog that does not lift all day.

The forest drinks from clouds

This forest does not live on rain, but on fog. The branches and leaves catch moisture from the Atlantic clouds climbing the slopes and let it down into the ground. It is a water collection system millions of years old, running without a pump and without an electricity bill.

El Cedro is the part with the oldest trees, and Laguna Grande is where most of the trails start. Roque de Agando is what was left when erosion ate the soft layers around hardened magma - a volcanic finger standing alone above the valley.

The villages below the forest

Agulo, Vallehermoso and Hermigua sit on the terraces below the park. The Hermigua valley is farmland in steps - the same technique you find on Balkan hillsides, except here bananas and palms grow on it instead of vines.

From the kitchen: gofio (flour from roasted grain), almogrote (a hard cheese spread), guisana water, a local potato tortilla, and wine from the forastera gomera grape that exists only here. None of it was designed for a tourist menu - it is food from an island where there once was not much choice.

And here is what separates La Gomera from every other island most of all: silbo, the whistled language. For centuries shepherds communicated across the valleys by whistling, because shouting does not carry that far. Today it is taught in workshops for visitors, but also in the island's schools - which means it is not a museum exhibit but a living language.

There is also the shepherd's leap, a pole technique for descending steep slopes, tastings in family cellars, courses in making almogrote. The island does not try to impress you. That is a rarer quality than it sounds.