is known to be very bad tasting. Though the sanitary quality of the water is acceptable already, enough to be drunk, the taste is not as good to be comparable with bottled water. This is about to change.

José Luís Talavera, the production director of ‘Emalsa’, Las Palmas‘ water company, stated that they’re testing a new system at the ‘Las Palmas III‘ desalination plant which will be working in a matter of more or less a month. This new system will treat the water to achieve a better taste of it, for now its rather disgusting than tasteful.

Well, that is good news. Its only thought to be done in Las Palmas at first, for its very expensive to be done anywhere else. Either way, great news, one step more towards future.

Not a ‘million dollar, baby,’

but 380 mil. € is the estimated budget of the project for the new Gando Airport Runway. The president of the Gran Canaria Council, José Miguel Pérez, advanced yesterday some details of the project that soon will be presented by the ‘furtherance ministry’.

The time-frame is estimated to be 38 months but the beginning hasn’t been determined yet. The new runway will be connected to the actual one and will have a length of 1.100 meters and will also be suitable for class F aircrafts, like the new Airbus A380.
This new runway will make Gran Canaria a very important enclave for trans atlantic flights.

Well…, though good for us on the one side, the environmental impact of this will be also considerable.

naturist association has been demanding a nudist area at the ‘Las Canteras‘ beach in Las Palmas for years, an idea that is now being overthought by the local coastal councillorship. Last July 15th was the international “swimsuitless day” and due to this the canary islands naturist association (Aniscan) wanted to state their claim for a nudist area at the ‘Las Canteras‘ beach.

Paco Ojeda, the president of Aniscan, is greatful that the Las Palmas council is going through this idea, which he stated would be a great touristic appeal for those naturists who decide to stay at the south of Gran Canaria since there are only nudist areas in this part of the isle.

Well, good news for those who like to hang around the beach in their birthday suit

if not the most famous, ‘fiesta’ on Gran Canaria is “La Rama“, which literally means ‘the branch’ but is at the same time short for “La Bajada de la Rama” or ‘the descent of the branch’, is held every year in August 4th, which would be tomorrow.

Traditionally the celebration is about going up the valley of Agaete dancing to the sound of a marching band, getting some tree branches, previously taken from trees in the ‘tamadaba forrest’, and taking them down (always dancing) to the ‘port of Las Nieves’ (the port of Agaete) to Our Lady of Las Nieves, who reside in the port hermitage, as an offering, after hitting the ports’ waters with them.

The mayor and the different neighbourhood associations of Agaete have decided not to carry branches this year, as a gesture of solidarity for the catastrophe suffered by the island due to the forrest fires. Only a few selected people, the usual devotees, will carry some, and the rest will get green handkerchiefs at the same place where they would normally get their branch.

Wow…, i got no words for this…
That is a really really nice gesture.

which was aparently controlled, was stoked up due to the high temperatures and the extreme wind that hit us last night. The municipality of Mogan got the worst part, since there have been people evacuated from their homes to avoid human casualties. Almost 60 to 70 homes have been already affected by the fire and around 2000 people evacuated. The towns of Ayacata, La Plata, Veneguera, Barranquillo de San Andrés and Cercados de Araña are within the heavily affected area.

The area burnt until yesterday was about 3500 hectares, wich should be unfortunately way over 4000 hectares. Lets hope all the firemen and all volunteers manage to extinguish it as soon as possible.

Some of the evacuated people shelter at the beach in ‘Mogan Playa’ were the ashes carried by the wind fall to their feet.
In Maspalomas we had 42º degrees at midnight with extreme strong wind gusts and now we are at 47º.

to provide sunshine wherever it’s needed and we on Gran Canaria fortunately have plenty of it. The Red Cross organizes from this monday till mid september and initiative to help handicaped people enjoy the beach as much as we do. The “leisure at the beach program” gives people with mobility problems the oportunity to take walk at the shore or a dip of the ‘Las Canteras‘ beach in Las Palmas.

For those living in Las Palmas the program includes a “pick-up service” in the morning for those who need it and then from 11:30 till 16:30, several volunteers will help take care of them. Other activities are planed too, swapping the seashore with visits to different places of Gran Canaria.

Now that is one good news i think. Great guys!!

I’m back again yeeaayy!! hahaha
I have been very busy the last months and I just wanted to start over again with some good news.

Therefore, here I go. The ‘port of Mogan‘ and the ‘Amadores beach‘, both in the municipality of Mogan, have been awarded once again with the so called "blue flag", which is given by the ‘Federation for Environmental Education’ for excelcent quality, cleanliness, accessibility and security of their waters and beaches.

The other "blueflagged" beaches on Gran Canaria are: the ‘Las Canteras‘ beach in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, the ‘Melenara‘ beach in Telde and the beaches of ‘San Agustín‘, ‘Playa del Inglés‘ and ‘Maspalomas‘ in San Bartolomé de Tirajana.
The other "blueflagged" ports are: the port of ‘Pasito Blanco‘ in the municipality of San Bartolomé de Tirajana and the only "blueflagged" non coastal area is the nature park of the ‘Dunes of Maspalomas‘, also in San Bartolomé

That’s nice, huh?? 27 beaches and 3 ports are "blueflagged" this year on the entire archipielago.

Don’t think it’s intentionally but a students life is busy while the exams last.
Please be patient, i finish this Tuesday and hopefully be posting again from then onwards

Thank you, Rayco.

Don’t get alarmed tonight,

if the entire island seems to be submerged in chaos with bonfires everywhere. We are neither under attack nor have been hit by a meteor shower.
If you don’t have nothing to do tonight, i higly recomend you wherever you are on the isle, but specially those near to the Playa del Inlges (San Bartolomé) and the Canteras (Las Palmas) beaches to visit these beaches around 12:00 PM.

Like every year in june, normally coinciding with days around the summer solstice, the night of the 23rd to 24th, we celebrate
“San Juan”. In this peculiar festivity there is a large fireworks spectacle and people make huge bonfires almost everywhere but the bigest are seen at the beaches. This was originally made to “strengthen the sun”, since the days will get shorter every day until the winter solstice.

You should witness this festivity, it is very spectacular.

at 12:00 PM i got a tip from a “source” i have telling me a light plane was at the beach of Playa del Águila at the south of the isle. I drove over there and to my surprise i saw a floatplane being pulled out of the water by the firemen. Specifically it was Lake Seawolf Renegade.

The pilot was forced to land on the water after using up all hise fuel. Aparently hedid nothing wrong beside that, since he had all his documents in order, but then police found out that he had thrown out the plane several bales of cocain. The 40 year old uruguayan pilot, who said he came from the Sahara, was initially set free last night, but was aprehended this morning with a few carafes of kerosene, in order to refill the planes’ tanks and flee

Police has retrieved several bales one of them of 25kg of weight, of estimated 200kg, and the search continued through all the day supported by and red cross speedboat and a helicopter.

Wow, what you think about that?? Lotta mafia-like stuff going on lately…. Here are some exclusive pictures y managed to take:

June 8th, a firemen corporal from the Las Palmas firefighter consortium, a sergeant exam to pass and two hooded people. Might not tell you a lot, but that were the “ingredients” of a mafia-like incident on Friday.

The mentioned corporal was on its way to do his theory exam to promote for a post as a sergeant when he was attacked and beat up by two hooded people. While he was beat up one of them said something like: “that’ll teach you not want to do promotion exams“.

There were 25 firemen that aspirated for the 3 availiable sergeant posts, which became only 5 after the first aptitude test. The corporal was among those 5, something that made him suspect the two hooded to be some of his colleagues and report this incident to the police.

Kinda shocked about that. Never thought we would live between such despicable people.

has come to an agreement with the airline ‘Jet2‘ wich will offer, starting in October this year, low cost flights from the UK to Gran Canaria. Leeds, Manchester, NewCastle and Belfast are the cities chosen for this particular project which will offer one daily low cost flight from each city to Gran Canaria, increasing the actual air traffic between Gran Canaria and the UK in almost 10%.

In adition to this the Tourist Board has also made another agreement with ‘Nowegian Air‘ which will offer low cost flights from Oslo to Gran Canaria. This new service is supposed to start in winter this year.

How you like that ?!?! Kinda cool i think. That’ll give our tourism-based economy a little push.

for thos of you who are interested, and if you voted yesterday for regional elections you probably are, the results are commonly known but i will summ them up a bit. Though i don’t like to talk about politics, this change for Las Palmas is worth to mention.
Big knock out for the Partido Popular in our capital since the PSOE won with absolute majority, ending a 3 terms in a row of “popularity”.

Jeronimo Saavedra (PSOE) is new Las Palmas major, Jose Manuel Soria (Partido Popular) is president of the council again but socialist candidate Juan Fernando Lopez Aguilar (PSOE) has 10 days to state a vote of no confidence and make a pact with other parties to gain the presidency. The parliament results are: 26 M.P.’s for PSOE, 17 M.P.’s for CC-PNC, 15 for the PP and 2 for CC-AHI.

Telde got took over almost entirely by Nueva Canarias and San Bartolomé (the south of the island) is mainly in control of Agrupacion de Vecinos lead by Marco Aurelio Perez.

For more detailed results look it up here: Municipalities – Council – Parliament

There you go again,

big screen time with the (aparently) last part of this amazing adventure ‘saga’. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End is the title of Disney’s last top production. Its’ official realease date was supposed to be on may 25th but Disney decided finally to release it a day earlier. Therefore, tomorrow is the big date.

Casting returnees are Johnny Depp (Captain Jack Sparrow), Orlando Bloom (Will Turner), Keira Knightley (Elizabeth Swann) and Geoffrey Rush (Captain Barbossa) with Chow Yun Fat making his first appearance as singapore pirate Sao Feng.
Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards makes a star appearance as Jack Sparrows father.

Oh, this makes now clear why he fell from a coconut palm a couple of months ago… …he was practicing his pirate role

One of these days i’ll finish uploading all the info on the main page on appartments and homes to rent, hotels, cottages, etc… here on Gran Canaria. When i have everything uploaded i’ll post again with all the main links, but i think you’ll find it very interesting to have a look at its’ content.

Stay tuned for the upcoming info.

you might’ve noticed a thick grey cloud layer above us. That what we have to deal with due to being a miniature continent. After a sunny hot week it’s now all cloudy as if it was deep winter.

The national institute of meteorology has predicted more clouds and possibly rain for tomorrow with temperatures between 17º and 24º degrees.

Leave your speedos and bikinis at home, it’s time not to sunbath

but apart from the 324 that arrived during the weekend, yesterday 6 ‘cayucos’ (dugboats) arrived to our islands with the astonishing number of 464 illegal immigrants. 4 boats arrived to the ‘Los Cristianos’ port (Tenerife), 1 to the ‘Las Carpinteras’ beach in San Bartolomé de Tirajana (Gran Canaria) and another one to Arrecife (Lanzarote).

I’ve said it once but this is really a tremendous job these days and i give a big ‘thumbs up!!’ for the Sea Rescue Team and the Guardial Civil Sea Patrol as well as to all the Red Cross and other volunteers that help out with these people, specially making it possible to rescue all the immigrants in time, no lifes lost this time.

Great job guys!!

Las Palmas mayor Pepa Luzardo and its citizen mobility & security councillor Paulino Montesdeoca presented the capitals’ local police new acquisition. It’s a new “high-tech” surveillance car which will allow to detect and process traffic infractions more easily. This acquisition is part of a security improvement plan i posted earlier about. (read more here)

This new police car, which looks suspiciously like a New York cab, not really to oversee, is equipped with a GPS reciever, a high resolution camera, a license plate acquisition system, an optical character recognition module, a touchscreen and an entire PC in its trunk, being able to detect cars through their license plate. It’ll be able to elaborate parking tickets and other infractions almost on its own.

How you like that?
Some will be pissed, others will think it’s great, but it will surely avoid traffic jams in areas with dense traffic scaring drivers of making double parking.

the rest of the Tejeda pictures i posted yesterday. Oh and, by the way, Tejeda is highly recomendable visiting at any time of the year, specially after some rainy days when the weather is sunny again.

Thanks again to Josele, for the great pictures…

finally i manage to post again. I’m really sorry for this unmeant break. Things came together all at the same time, construction works at home, refurbishment, college works,… :S
I’ll hopefully be able to manage it so this won’t happen again.

As a matter of ‘reward’ i post you this awesome pictures a friend took for me of Tejeda, at our islands heart. I’ll post some now and the rest on another post, since they’re a lot.
I was just as astonished as you’ll be after going through them:

Josele, thanks for the pictures…

i saw an article that shocked me, and will probably cause the same effect to you. Last wednesday, the patrol boat “Rio Duero” from the “Guardia Civil” which is part of the FRONTEX, the external border security agency of the European Union, was literally attacked by illegal immigrants when they where about to be rescued.

The patrol boat intercepted a “cayuco”, a type of boat used by immigrants, near the mauritanian coast heading towards the canary islands and wanted to rescue them and take them back to the coast. At the time when they got near the “cayuco” they were literally attacked by the occupants with !!! MOLOTOV COCTAILS !!! to avoid being rescued.
When the agents decided to get closer by a zodiac, a small inflatable motorized boat, to explain them they only wanted to take them back to the coast, they attacked the boat with sharp objects to avoid the agents intervention.

Afraid of sinking the agents distanced themselves from the “cayuco” which finally got away. Though it was intercepted again by the “Guardia Civil” and arrived at the port of “Arguineguin” where an agent of the “Rio Duero” patrol boat, who traveled here from Mauritania, identified several of the immigrants.

Wow, what u think about that..? What now? Whats next?
Will they be carrying guns along now or what…? Kinda scary…

…yeah, it rained this morning. After a sunny hot summerday, nothing better then a slight rainfall to clean up the air. After watching the F1 race my mom told me to get my camera out and take some pictures. So…i took out a large tripod and went out to hunt some raindrops.

Here’s the result:

The last one might be one of the best shots i’ve ever taken…
What do you think…? Gimme some comments on that…

i had the chance to take a trip with a friend on a Cessna, flying over the south of Gran Canaria, and i have to say it was just great. And as you might have noticed it seems that i have always my camera with me…
Here are some of the best shots i took:

Thanks for the ride Krile…

but plain reality. During last weekend the SEPRONA, the "nature protect division" of the Guardia Civil found two snakes at two different locations on Gran Canaria. One in a home at the ‘Rafael Cabrera str.’ in Las Palmas and another one in the municipality of Valsequillo.

The one found in Las Palmas was a young ‘Python‘ of more than 1m length. The second one found in a natural reserve called “La Higuera Canaria“, in Valsequillo, was an albino ‘California Kingsnake‘. The Guardia Civil is doing some researches to find the last tenant of the home since the snake was found by the owner after the tenant left.

Both snakes were given to the ‘Crocodile Park’ in Agüimes where they’re kept correctly and safely.

at the entrance of the city of Las Palmas was yesterday lashed by the rough. The weather gradually got worse through out the day and ended up flooding 8 houses and hitting several more with stones from a small cove, that dissapeared due to the ‘mayhem’. Waves of up to 5m hit ‘San Cristóbal’ and the drivers on the ‘Avenida Marítima’, Las Palmas’ main road by the sea, were able to see the seas’ rage.

The neighbours said not to be afraid of the sea itself but of what it would do to their homes. They also were afraid of what would happen at high tide at 2 in the morning, if it would get worse, but fortunately it didn’t.

Poor people there. I’ve been there and the houses are really near to the water. Ad some crazy climate changes with rough weather and you got it. :S

have been extremely windy. Yesterday night and this morning have been even worse. The sea is extremely rough as far as i know almost around the entire isle, so be very careful. Clic on the picture to enlarge it. It’s the seaview from Las Palmas this midday.

Throttle down your speed on the highway too since it goes through vast areas with no mountains and is susceptible to strong gusts of wind.

I had problems keeping my car on the road from the aeroclub
(San Agustin, in San Bartolomé) to Vecindario (in Santa Lucia), so be careful. Watch your hats and skirts.

I suppose that the ones who read and follow this blog are actual tourists or potential tourists, or even people from any country that have settled down here.

For all those i have to thank you, since due to the last “sectorial service plan”, the 36.2% of the canarian “Gross Domestic Product” is given by tourism. This also means that tourism represents a 37.3% of the entire canarian employement. 90.0% of our exported services are by means of tourism too.

So, once again… thank you.

a pretty cool radio station in english language here in the south of Gran Canaria. I gotta figure out their broadcasting range but i have to give them a big plus.

It’s “Radio Top 21” on the 92.0 FM

Actually “Radio Top 21” also broadcasts in spanish on 95.9 FM but the broadcast is different on the two. Though i think it’s the same station.

Thumbs up guys!! keep it going…

a dead big Finback Whale arrived at the port of Las Palmas stuck to the front bulb of a a ferrys’ bow. The Ferry named “Soroya” arrived at the port at this early morning from Tenerife, arriving previously from Cadiz. The cetacen, of an aproximate length of 20m and aproximately 17 tons of weight was already dead when it got hit by the ship.

As soon as the whale was detected during the tie up maneuveres the port authorities control group was alerted which also called a divers group to loose the whale from the ship tie it to the dock. At the morning hours then several tecnicians arrived to examine it.

said goodbye to their carnival fests burning the typical huge sardine, made out of wire and paperpaste. Normally during the “sardines’ burying” all the participants in this parade dress like widows spending the entire parade crying out loudly.

This is our typical way of ending the carnival festivities and every city that has a carnival parade has this “burying” and is pretty funny.

If you have the oportunity to see this, i recomend it to you.