GR 131 El Bastón (La Palma) accommodation: where to stay and how to plan it

What makes accommodation planning different here

Two different problems, and they are usually described as one. Between about km 8 and km 59 there is effectively nothing: the Refugio Punta de los Roques at km 31, an unmanned 20 place stone shelter on the caldera rim at 2,040 m with no warden, no booking and no water you can drink; the El Pilar recreational area at km 43, where the accommodation is a permit and your own tent; and no accommodation and no official campsite at Roque de los Muchachos, where the hardest stage ends. Nothing on the crest can be reserved: the refuge is first come first served, and the camping zone is a free administrative authorisation from the island council rather than a reservation. The operators who sell this traverse in three stages base walkers in a single hotel in Santa Cruz de La Palma and taxi them to and from each stage end, which tells you plainly what the middle of the route amounts to. The first 8 km is the opposite problem. Between Puerto de Tazacorte and the Tijarafe terraces at La Punta and Los Gomeros there are two dozen mapped places to stay, and almost all of them are self-catering holiday houses and villas let by an agency with a minimum stay: three nights is common and seven is normal for anything with a pool. They are beds, but they are not beds for one night on the way past, and a planner that counts them as such will overstate this end of the route badly. Casa Victor at km 8, the only property at the stop a four day plan uses for its first night, is a two person cottage let by the week. The places that will genuinely take a walker for a single night are the hotels and the pension stock, and they are in the towns rather than on the trail: Tazacorte and Los Llanos de Aridane at the north end, Los Canarios at the south. Los Llanos, a few kilometres inland from the Tazacorte end, is the honest answer for a bed before or after the walk, and it has both a plain three star hotel and a town hostel taking single nights. There is no trail-wide booking system, because there is almost nothing on the route to book. Town beds in Tazacorte, Los Llanos de Aridane and Los Canarios are booked direct with the operator. The holiday houses through Tijarafe are a different market and go through letting agencies, chiefly Las Casas Canarias, la-palma.travel, Clariso and Eco Fincas La Palma, who set the minimum stay and add a compulsory final cleaning charge on top of the nightly rate; two agencies listing the same house can publish different conditions, so ask whichever one you book through. The El Pilar camping zone is an administrative authorisation from the Cabildo de La Palma's Servicio de Medio Ambiente, free of charge, applied for on their standard form through the island's electronic office or in person at a registry office; the same department handles permission to sleep outside the authorised zones while walking a multi-day traverse. Camping in the Caldera de Taburiente national park is a separate system, booked through the national parks reservation service with between 24 hours and 15 days' notice, maximum 10 people per group. The Refugio Punta de los Roques cannot be booked at all. This is a winter walking trail, and that is the point of it. The island trail network recommends the Fuencaliente to El Pilar stage "All year round except the hottest summer days", and warns on that southern half of "Heat, lack of water and wind" producing dehydration "although in winter it can be cold". An operator running the full traverse recommends September to May and says to avoid the extreme heat of summer. The complication is altitude rather than cold at sea level: the crest reaches 2,426 m, the official stage 1 notes say to beware of snow in winter, and signs on the ridge warn against continuing the crest section in winter when there is ice. So the honest shape of the year is that the south is at its best in the months a northern walker most wants to escape, while the high middle can be a mountain in January. Nothing on the route that we could find has a published closed season: the refuge is unstaffed all year and the camping zone publishes none. Both ends need a road transfer. The southern end is the Faro de Fuencaliente, a lighthouse among salt pans with no settlement: the nearest is Los Canarios, about 6 km up the trail, which has shops, bars, a pharmacy and the one pension we could confirm on the route. The northern end is Puerto de Tazacorte, a fishing village with a beach, restaurants and a supermarket, a few kilometres below Los Llanos de Aridane where the choice of beds is far wider. The two stage ends in the middle are both roadheads: El Pilar sits on the LP-301 with a bus stop and a car park, and Roque de los Muchachos has the observatory road, so a taxi off the mountain is the usual answer to a stage that ends nowhere. Times and fares change, so check them live rather than trusting anything written down here. Strict, specific, and worth getting right, because a walker who assumes the ridge is fair game is planning something illegal. First, camping is in principle confined to designated zones. The island regulation (Boletin Oficial de la Provincia de Santa Cruz de Tenerife no. 87, 30 June 2014) defines a zona de acampada as a marked area where tents may be pitched "por un periodo de tiempo no superior a siete dias", lists the areas it governs, and prohibits "Acampar fuera de los lugares senalados". Fire is expressly forbidden in camping zones. On this route that gives exactly one legal pitch, the Refugio de El Pilar, and only with prior authorisation. Second, the crest between Roque de los Muchachos and Punta de los Roques runs along the rim of the Caldera de Taburiente national park, where camping is permitted only at the zone down in the caldera at Playa de Taburiente: the park's booking page states "It's forbidden to camp somewhere else", and its visitor rules list camping outside that zone among prohibited acts. That covers the ground beside the Refugio Punta de los Roques, so sleeping inside the refuge is free and allowed while pitching next to it is not. Third, there is an authorisation for sleeping out while walking a multi-day traverse, issued by the same environment department; guidance says to apply at least ten days ahead presenting your intended itinerary, and a walker who did this in March 2024 reported obtaining it by email and being told it covered anywhere except the national park. The council's own camping authorisation procedure accepts applications at any time, online or in person, but the online route expects Spanish electronic identification, so writing to the department is worth trying if you cannot use it. Confirm the detail with the department rather than treating any of it as settled. What the 2021 eruption did to this route, since it is the first thing anyone asks. The vents opened at Cabeza de Vaca, on the western flank of the Cumbre Vieja above Las Manchas, on 19 September 2021 and ran for 85 days; the flows went west and downhill, reaching the sea and covering over 1,000 hectares of the Aridane valley. They did not reach the crest the GR131 follows, which runs roughly 2 km east of the vents and well above them, so no part of this route is under lava. The trail network was closed during the emergency and the southern stage, the Ruta de los Volcanes, reopened in May 2022; all three stage pages on the island trail network showed "open" when checked on 30 July 2026, and that is the page to check live rather than trusting a date. What you actually walk through is ash: a large area of pine forest around El Pilar was covered by ashfall and walkers still report the path itself ashy underfoot. Do not confuse the GR131 with the separate visit to the Tajogaite crater, which is a different route with its own access rules. Water, not accommodation, is the constraint that shapes a plan here: the official stage notes say to take generous supplies because "the springs along the way may be dry", the refuge has a roof-fed tank rather than drinking water, and a walker in January 2020 had to treat the water at El Pilar even though it is listed as potable. One effect of the eruption still closes beds, and it is not lava. Puerto Naos and La Bombilla, the two coastal settlements immediately west of the flow, sit over ground that vents carbon dioxide, and the gas collects in basements, ground floors and hollows, which is why the restriction there is building by building rather than area wide and why it has been lifted in stages against live gas monitoring. The Cabildo moved the access controls back to the edge of the area it calls the Zona Negra in June 2024 and dropped the QR codes for everywhere else, and on 28 July 2026 it reduced the restricted zone again to allow bathing at part of Playa Chica; at that point 1,020 of 1,178 authorised installations in Puerto Naos and 52 of 62 in La Bombilla held the paperwork to return. Neither village is on this route and none of the places below is in either of them, but both are in the same valley as Tazacorte and Los Llanos de Aridane, where most walkers sleep before the climb out of the harbour. A listing being online is not evidence that the building can be occupied, so check any Puerto Naos or La Bombilla address against the Cabildo before booking it.