One day towards the sodden tale end of the summer, my boyfriend casually mentioned to me that one of his Dad’s ex-partners had got in touch with him. "So?"

And so it was settled, we would have a wonderful time sunning ourselves in La Palma for a week, just before the tearful goodbye, as it was only a few days before I was due to move and start here at Southampton. We boarded our Thompson flight at stupid o’clock in the morning in damp Manchester, and a mere 4 hours later arrived bathed in mid-morning sun on the eastern side of the small island.

La Palma is one of the most unique Canary Isles, with much of its sloping land given to banana groves produced for mass export. It’s much less touristy than the other eastern Canary Isles such as Tenerife, Lanzarote and Gran Canaria. We found ourselves going on rambles, lazing around at the beaches and buying tat at the Sunday morning markets-cum-car boot sales rather than wild clubbing every night, which suited us just fine.

‘The Caldera de Taburiente’, the once huge volcano and the various canyons, gorges and ring of mountains that surround it, dominates the northern part of La Palma. The temperature drops as we drove from the northern coastline, with its natural seawater pools a pleasant surprise. As we sped round the precarious winding roads at break-neck speed, we noted the changes in flora and fauna; we’d got used to seeing palm trees, banana groves and lizards at the coast but now the roads were lined with fir trees and birds of prey circled high above us. The inner area of the National Park is only accessible by hard-core hiking. We were tempted to spend a night or two under the stars, but were put off by the amount of planning necessary to undertake the adventure; written permission was needed from the park rangers, along with the proper mountaineering equipment, which all seemed a bit of a fuss.

Despite neither of us having any decent command of Spanish we still managed to soak up the Spanish culture nicely, having siestas, drinking copious amounts of red wine and munching on goats cheese, olives, and surprisingly, cold meats. All of the shops were well stocked with all sorts of cold meats and we wondered why, as traditionally the Spanish don’t go in for that kind of thing. To our surprise we discovered that La Palma has a large German ex-pat community, and they certainly influence all sorts of things over there. For one the TVs in the apartments were all subscribed to German cable channels, we spent a few fruitless hours trying to understand various interesting looking programmes, but it was all in vain.

I spent plenty of time smearing sun-cream on my pale-skinned boyfriend, while he shot jealous (he swears that they were merely appreciative) looks at my unburnable mocha-hued body, and were both thankful that we hadn’t gone during the scorching mid-summer months, as even in the cooler late September he still burnt. Oh, but we’ll definitely be going back, this time with factor 50!