TEMISAS VILLAGE

Temisas is a village halfway up a mountainside, famous for its rural architecture white stone houses with pink tiled roofs, windows with wooden shutters, a little 18th century whitewashed church with a belfry, a water mill and hillsides dotted with olive trees (Temisas is sometimes known as Little Jerusalem). Like many inland villages, though, the problem here is depopulation, with the young leaving for coastal towns in search of almost any work that is easier than tilling terraces From here there are clear views down to a coast of plastic greenhouses, with the town of Arinaga in the distance. The view is broken by the nearby bulk of a very solid rocky outcrop, unimaginatively named EI Roque, rising from the plain beneath.