In the harsh realm of Sabina.

She is the forgotten gem of the Canary Islands. El Hierro is on the sidelines, since millions of years ago a volcano rocks ausspie - but every four years is really hype: if the Herreños with the Virgin dancing.

 

The end of the Old World has no more tenants. The lighthouse keeper is extracted, as the Faro de Orchillo five years ago was converted to automatic. Now it is no longer there, the light anmacht, when the sun over the Atlantic is one with the horizon and the slag fields around the tower rust-colored. Up to now we presented what in ancient times knew of the universe, so Ptolemy moved here the zero meridian. Greenwich did not come until the 1883rd Until then, El Hierro, the westernmost of the Canary Islands, the place of the first and last degree of longitude? finis terre.

Today is the end of the world the raven. A couple sitting on the parapet of the abandoned lighthouse, another schnarrend draws circles on the Lavakies round, on a stony desert, where only lichens, candelabra-Spurge and cacti survive. And - thanks to the Ravens - the juniper. His seed shall be through by the birds, eaten, digested and eliminated, otherwise it does not germinate.

But in the solitude El Hierros they have found: Kolkrabe and juniper, which is called Sabina, and the only reason there is the tree, the symbol of the island: a wooden monument of nature, the eternal niedergerungen Northeast and often over the centuries grotesquely deformed.

From his wooden Herreños have done almost every tool that is here needs to live: Mortars for the green garlic sauce on the rabbit, dried grids for the goat and the little spatula that can Napfschnecken from the wet rock in the Atlantic surf beat .

The best spatula to make it in Sabinosa say here, the place that is like the juniper, and in the Juan Guitiérrez Machin has his workshop. A to gable with wooden pieces filled chamber in which the master behind inch-thick glasses and a leather apron, sits on the lathe. "I am a carpenter, artist and museum boss," says Machin, "I get a table, a crucifix and a gourd like a hundred years ago." Only nothing more from juniper, which is now under protection, and Machin must take mulberry wood.

Always in Siesta Sabinosa

Large clientele, he has not any more. Two years ago, each path in El Hierros West at Bergdorf Sabinosa and machine shop gone. But then, they have the old runway on the coast paved. And all of a sudden was the end of the world in Sabinosa. On the small plaza located on the old banana boxes, see the cats and lizard to hear the television from a bar, which still remained, and, far away, the tide slowly louder.

In Sabinosa is now always siesta, this is up the coast. Life in El Hierro plays especially in the Valle del Golfo, the fertile valley on the north west coast. The green level is surrounded by up to 1000 meter high cliffs, as the scene of a huge semi-circular stone amphitheater. Live here most of the around 8000 Herreños, and here it also attracts most of the few who can be found in El Hierro.

SPAIN AND PORTUGAL-QUIZ

AP, DDP, Antje Blinda