The Canary Islands, spectacularly volcanic in their Atlantic home off the bulge of Africa, offer the nearest winter sun to northern Europe and have been receiving British visitors since the eighteenth century. Though the coasts of the main islands are now, of course, highly developed the high, wild, craggy, cratered interiors of both Tenerife and Gran Canaria provide lofty and dramatic walking with astonishing views.

Tenerife possesses Spain’s highest mountain, the great cone of Mount Teide at 3,718 metres. The small islands lying further west, including La Gomera, are far less touched by tourism and seemingly exist in large part in a state of nature. They offer delightful and fascinating walking.

Landscapes in all the islands are strange as well as beautiful. Some of the islands are green, like La Palma, or forested on top, not on the sides, like La Gomera. Ravines and winter torrents abound. Plant life is exceptional, with many indigenous species. The Dragon tree flourishes like some strange animal from an earlier world. Perhaps the laurisilva forests, last survivors of the vegetation that covered the Mediterranean basin before the Ice Age, will be of greatest interest to botanists and gardeners.

The earliest inhabitants of the Canary Islands were Stone Age people. The ancients knew of the Canary Islands and called them the Fortunate Islands or Islands of the Blessed. Mediaeval sailors from Europe raided them for slaves. The Spanish finally took the islands in the late fifteenth century. Columbus set sail from La Gomera on his first voyage to the Americas and the Canaries soon became a springboard for America-bound Spanish shipping. Later the port of Las Palmas on Gran Canaria became one of the great coaling stations for Atlantic shipping.

Memorials of the early inhabitants are plentiful and moving. Some Spanish colonial architecture survives and there is some dashing modern architecture, product of Canarian determination to enter the cultural mainstream.

Even more striking is the annual winter music festival, which celebrates its 27th year in 2011. Tenerife and Gran Canaria place great store by their musical tradition, and this event sets out to programme the major symphonic repertoire of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as to present some of the finest classical artists in the world today.

And the venues? Two are modern, acoustically excellent, backed by the ocean and designed by Oscar Tusquets (Gran Canaria) and Santiago Calatrava (Tenerife). The Teatro Pérez Galdós in Gran Canaria is neoclassical and has recently emerged from a lengthy period of restoration.

We begin in Tenerife and end in Gran Canaria, interspersing music with walks and visits. In between we spend three nights on La Gomera, providing further variety in the walks and a rest from the hustle of towns.