GAt the beginning, in the theory lesson, Momo, our freediving instructor, says what this is all about. We look out of the dining room window of our holiday home down at the silvery Atlantic Ocean, and what Momo says applies to holding your breath twenty meters under the sea just as much as to walking barefoot on a volcanic crater or to life in general, out here, at the end of the world, on the last and wildest of the Canaries, El Hierro. He says: You have to learn to relax in extreme situations.
A family vacation is not necessarily an extreme situation – but a trip to a windswept volcanic island is something different than the usual vacation on a sandy beach. A little more than a million years ago, the youngest of the Canaries erupted from the sea, the slopes of lava rock appear as if they had just solidified. The Atlantic pounded the cliffs tirelessly, almost as if it still hadn’t gotten used to the new land. Trade winds drive clouds against the ridge that divides the island’s climate: overcast and windy in the northwest, dry and hot in the southeast. And there you should relax?