The best viewpoints on La Palma
Some islands are for driving through, and some are for looking down on. La Palma is the second kind, and not by chance: in little more than forty kilometres end to end it climbs from sea level to the 2,426 metres of Roque de los Muchachos. With that much vertical, almost every bend ends up being a balcony.
Why La Palma is different
On Tenerife the viewpoints compete with Teide, which takes all the attention. Here there is no single star: there is an enormous crater in the middle, a recent volcano in the west, ravines dropping to the sea, and a sea of clouds that slides in over all of it.
That means La Palma's viewpoints do not show you the same thing. Each one tells a different part of the island, which is why it is worth choosing by what you want to see rather than by what is closest.
If you want the equivalent on the neighbouring island, we have the best viewpoints on Tenerife.
Roque de los Muchachos, the roof of the island
It is the highest point on La Palma and the most spectacular, mainly because it looks straight into the rim of the Caldera de Taburiente. From up there the crater is visible in full, and with luck you see it filled with cloud, the summits sticking out like islands.
Two warnings that save disappointment:
You can drive up, but the road is long. This is not a quick detour: budget for the climb and the descent.
It is genuinely cold up there, even in summer, and the wind is noticeable. Take a warm layer even if you are in a t shirt at the coast.
This area is also one of the best places on earth to look at the sky, and that is not marketing: it is the reason the observatories are there. Where to stand and how to prepare is in where to see the stars.
The volcano viewpoints
The 2021 eruption changed the map of the west of the island, and the way people visit it. Today there are several public points from which you can see the cone and the lava flows.
The best known is the Tajuya viewpoint, beside the road in the municipality of El Paso, a few kilometres from the cone. During the eruption it was where the media and photographers worked, which is why it is probably the most recognisable panorama of the volcano.
The key planning point: to see the volcano from the viewpoints you do not need to book or pay for anything. They are public and open. What is regulated is going close to the cone itself, which is done accompanied.
And something worth saying, because this is not only landscape: it happened very recently and it affected people who live there. You look at it with the same respect you would give any place where someone lost their home. The full geological context is in the volcanoes of the Canary Islands.
El Time and the Aridane valley
The El Time viewpoint, in Tijarafe, sits on a bend in the road above Puerto de Tazacorte, around five hundred metres up, and gives one of the most complete views on the island: the whole Aridane valley, the mouth of the Barranco de las Angustias and, since 2021, the new ground formed where the lava reached the sea.
It is one of the few places where the scale of what happened becomes clear at a glance, because you see the town, the valley and the altered coastline all at once.
La Cumbrecita, with one condition
La Cumbrecita is the southern balcony of the Caldera de Taburiente, and it is the easiest way to look into the national park without committing to a long walk.
The condition: access is regulated. The car park is small, and in season you need to arrange it in advance through the national park's official channel. It is not complicated, but you cannot improvise it on a Sunday morning, and that is exactly how people end up disappointed.
The north, which almost nobody looks at
The northern half of La Palma is the least travelled, and it has viewpoints that draw far fewer people: balconies over wooded ravines around Barlovento and Garafía, with laurel forest, dragon trees, and a completely different light from the west.
If you have time and have already seen the obvious, this is the part that tends to surprise people most. We frame it inside what to see on La Palma, and the specific places are going into the island guide.
How to make the most of them
Three rules that work across the island:
Check the sea of clouds before you drive up. If the cloud is low, you will have sun and an extraordinary panorama above it. If it is high, you can climb two thousand metres to see nothing.
Go early or late in the afternoon. Midday light flattens the landscape, and here the relief is precisely the thing to look at.
Allow for driving time. La Palma is small on the map and slow in practice: distances are measured in bends, not kilometres.
And if after all those viewpoints you fancy getting into the water, there are the beaches of La Palma, black sand and a good deal quieter than those on the bigger islands.
Cover photo: Gerda Arendt, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
