Roque Bentayga

Looks like a troll with his tongue stuck out, no?

Roque Bentayga is my favourite piece of rock on the island.

What follows is a description of a very short walk, or rather a visit, to the uppermost reasonably accessible bit of it. There is a little platform up to which you can come by a path. After that the formation becomes really vertical and you can’t possibly scale it without climbing equipment, and I believe you are not supposed to. I think there is about thirty meters from the platform to the very top.

The surroundings of the Roque offer beautiful views around Caldera de Tejeda. As I said, the walk could be extremely short, if you simply drive up to the car park, but doesn’t need to be, if you feel energetic. It can be done as a side branch of one of many possible circular routes that start and end in Tejeda.

For example, this circular route — https://es.wikiloc.com/rutas-senderismo/circular-tejeda-por-timagada-y-las-moradas-191897592 — is just over 8 km. The visit to Roque Bentayga will add another 6 kilometers to it. And if you don’t feel as energetic as those resulting 14 kilometers you can do what I did — take a bus to shave off some of the distance, visit Bentayga and return to Tejeda walking. The number of routes criss-crossing the center of the island is such that it permits endless permutations. 

 

Scary zigzag leads from the slope of Artenara to the bottom of Tejeda ravine. I am sure the ravine has another name at this point, but I can’t find it right now

Same as with The Dog of Bentayga, I took the infrequent bus number 18 from Tejeda to Las Moradas, and walked to the same fork of the road, this time taking the branch that goes to Roque Bentayga (obviously). The somewhat annoying bit of this walk, the same as with The Dog, is that there is no path for a part of it. You just have to walk a couple of kilometers on the road to the car park of Bentayga.

On the way up I was given a lift (which I didn’t ask for) by a friendly German guy, but walking on a road isn’t a big problem, as there are very few cars. Just a minor annoyance.

There is a visitor center next to the car park, which is free and rather nice. There were not that many visitors last time I went, and even fewer on my previous visits. I think Roque Nublo rather steals the limelight from Bentayga. It results in visitor center’s staff being extremely helpful and willing to have prolonged chats with anybody who comes in.

White houses of Artenara village top right, pine forests of Tamadaba massif top left, a shadow of Bentayga bottom center

From the visitor center the walk up starts. Relatively recently a wall with a gate in it was put around the garden, with the opening hours specified on it. I am reasonably sure you can still get on the Roque if you arrive out of hours, but I didn’t try it myself as I didn’t need to. In a few hundred meters the path will bring you to a platform at the bottom of the last vertical tier of Bentayga.

The platform is apparently not a natural plateau, but rather made by humans, and is called Almogaren del Bentayga, Almogaren being either a place of worship, or place of gathering.

There are a few shallow round indentations in in the rock of the platform, called cazoletas. The exact use of them is unknown, but one of the versions is that they were used in religious rutuals, possibly to make offerings of milk, animal blood or simply water, since water was always a rare commodity on the island, to whoever was the deity on duty.

Mesa de los Junquillos flat top outcrop, La Aldea de San Nicolas in the far distance, calima

The views all around are absolutely spectacular. The (locally-) famous saying by Miguel de Unamuno about Gran Canaria being “una tremenda tempestad petrificada, una tempestad de fuego, de lava”, “a tremendous petrified storm, a storm of fire, of lava”, here doesn’t seem an artistic exaggeration.

After visiting Roque Bentayga, I had to get to Tejeda somehow. There is always an option to go through Cruz de Timagada, which is what I did when I visited the Dog of Bentayga, but this time I decided to go on a little adventure and try a much shorter, although a lot steeper, route through Barranco de Tejeda.

Rock crystals in the walls of Barranco de Tejeda. You have to go all the way down and then, logically, all the way up

It worked reasonably well, and would have worked out even better if it wasn’t for a spot of windy and rainy weather a few days prior to my outing. Walls of the steep ravines inside the Caldera are built of crumbly rock, and rockslides of various scales are frequent. This time it seems that a part of the path slided down, possibly taking with it some of the signposts.

You can hardly get lost inside the Caldera, as you have all orientirs you can possibly need. What can happen, however, is missing a path and finding yourself in a middle of thick vegetation, for example. This is precisely what happened to me. I readily admit it was a bit of stupidity on my part — I could have just gone back and find a reasonable alternative, but, well, I saw a clear path about ten meters below and decided that it will be easy to get there.

Under certain angles, Roque Bentayga resemples a battleship, doesn’t it?

Well, I was wrong, but not dramatically so. After some struggling with canes and dry bushes, I did find myself on the path across the ravine. I was a bit worse for wear, but nothing drastuc.

So. By now I desribed two possible attractions in the middle of Caldera de Tejeda, The Dog of Bentayga and Roque Bentayga itself. There is another one, Cuevas del Rey, King’s Caves, so I guess this is still coming up.