The barefoot immortals

As we settled ourselves outside a café, four of them were just getting up to leave, gathering together their rucksacks, carrier bags, guitars, two African drums, a sack of juggling clubs and a small rumpled dog on a rope.

The astonishing thing about hippies is that they are clearly immortal. They haven't aged in more than half a century, looking exactly the same now as they did in the 1960s except that the flowers in their hair have mostly withered and gone. Otherwise identical though - the same baggy pants, granny wrappings, long hair left to do its thing and, very often, bare feet.


Bare feet! These are a key component of the whole Back-to-Nature ethos. One of the leading proponents of barefootedness was the teenage singer Sandie Shaw (now a pensioner), whose little pink toes would pace the stage as she sang: 'I walk along the city streets you used to walk along with me...' In bare feet? No wonder he vanished. Who wants a girlfriend whose feet smell of old cigarette ends?

'Are you on your way to Valle Gran Rey?' we asked the departing hippies. Usually they're on their way to VGR because the myth persists that it's a hippie haven, which it really hasn't been for many decades, it's a working port and a tourist resort with smart hotels and apartments, sandy beaches and some excellent restaurants.

'We've just come from there,' one of the girls replied. She looked a bit glum.

'Didn't like it much this time,' added the other girl.

Oh, why?

It had changed, she complained, to nods of agreement from the others. 'Too many police around,' one of the guys contributed, perhaps unwisely, shaking his pony tail. We didn't ask why that might be a problem and anyway they were hurrying to catch the ferry to Tenerife, but one reason could be that they'd had difficulties in trying to set up camp.

There is emerging agreement among the island's town councils that something needs to be done about los hippies. Not that anyone is particularly against hippiedom in itself, Gomerans are tolerant of most kinds of normalities and eccentricities, but the problem is that today's hippies usually arrive with a limited budget that rules out staying in even a cheap pensión for any length of time, so they set up camp on a beach or in a field.

Not only is this illegal, it's also damaging to an island that prides itself on being unspoiled. People come here from all over the world to wander along paths and beaches where all they encounter is the natural environment, and an especially beautiful one at that. A fairy circle of hippies slapping drums, twanging guitars and chucking juggling sticks in the air is not what most visitors are seeking.

And being fair, probably the hippies themselves don't realise that the isolated beach or clearing where they're pitching their hoop tents and lighting camp fires is a designated Lugar de Interés Científico, a Site of Scientific Interest, to be cherished and protected. Much of the island is protected one way or another, not least the World Heritage laurel forest that covers 40 square kilometres.

In recent weeks the Guardia Civil, the national police who get tasked with this kind of thing, have evicted several groups of campers from around the island, in one case a colony of over a hundred individuals living on a remote beach. The Guardia do it gently - no charging with riot shields - they just warn the campers that what they're doing is not permitted and make sure they pack up and go.

It's a shame, but a small island has to choose what kind of haven it wants to be. Unfortunately for the world's everlasting hippies, this seems to be a Europe-wide trend. Being a hippie brings new challenges these days.

A local journalist recently offered a different angle on this phenomenon. The relationship between La Gomera and its hippies is a little deeper than it seems. Back in the sixties, the people who turned up to make a temporary home here (mostly young Germans and English) came with some kind of income, or at least prospects of earning one. They were simply looking for an unconventional lifestyle.

They were all labelled hippies when they arrived but some of them stayed, worked, set up home and renovated old houses. The most significant point, though, is that those early adventurers played a big role in putting La Gomera on the tourist map. In particular, the valley, port and beaches of Valle Gran Rey, which is now one of the island's principal tourist venues. There's a historical debt of gratitude, when viewed this way.

A personal one as well, in fact. It was a hippie who first told us about this island some thirty years ago, a girl on a coach in southern Spain. She spoke of ancient, abandoned cottages in the hills where it was possible to sleep for nothing. Maybe it was, in those distant days, if you could find space on the cottage floor between all the bare feet. Today, forget it, the abandoned cottages are either roofless, occupied by goats or exquisitely renovated as casas rurales, country cottages for visiting ramblers. Wearing boots.

Notes for the serious student
What is a hippie? Wikipedia tells me the word derives from hipster, which was an African American term for one of the in-crowd as we used to say then, people who were right up there with the latest trends. Cool. (That's another word that lives on from the 60s.) The root word, hip, is of uncertain origin.

Also uncertain is whether hippie should be spelt hippy, which fits better with standard English - one hippy, two hippies - but the snag is that hippy as an adjective means, well, lots of hip. Broad in the beam. One of the dafter songs of that era was 'Hippy hippy shake' which required dancers to shake their hips left and right. This was obviously addressed to people with hips and not hippies, who generally don't have hips because they eat only beans, carrots and green leafy vegetables. So I think that's pretty conclusive.