Caldera de Taburiente National Park

Vast collapsed volcanic crater that forms the heart of the island, now a national park with serious hiking

The Caldera de Taburiente is the great geographical fact of La Palma — a collapsed volcanic crater eight kilometres across and nearly 1,500 metres deep, ringed by walls of basalt and laurel forest and threaded by streams that converge into the Río Almendro below. The national park covers the entire caldera and its rim, and the hiking here is outstanding.

The most popular approach is from the visitor centre at El Paso, with trails descending into the caldera floor. The Roque de los Muchachos ridge walk along the crater rim is the other classic, offering views into the caldera on one side and across the island on the other. Camping is permitted inside the caldera (with a permit from the park authority); spending a night inside is an experience — the caldera walls block out the surrounding sea and you feel genuinely remote, even though you are in the middle of a small island.

The laurel forest (laurisilva) that covers the caldera walls is a Macaronesian relict — a fragment of the subtropical forest that covered much of southern Europe before the last ice age. It is protected as part of the national park.

things to do sight
A story
The Caldera is not actually a caldera in the volcanic sense — it did not form by collapse into an empty magma chamber. Modern geology identifies it as a massive erosion basin created over millions of years as the original volcanic peak was cut apart by water and landslide. The Guanche people who inhabited La Palma before the Spanish conquest called the place Taburiente and treated it as sacred. When Spanish forces finally conquered the island in 1493, one of the last Guanche chiefs, Tanausú, held out for months inside the Caldera before being captured by treachery rather than force.