Premium Experience

Our most popular flight. Twenty to thirty minutes of airtime from 700 to 1,000 metres, with thermal gains that can take you higher than you started. Your pilot uses the rising air currents that form along the south ridge to extend the flight, and — if you ask for it — can work in gentle acrobatic manoeuvres. This is the flight most of our returning passengers choose. Best for anyone who wants the full paragliding sensation rather than a taste of it.

The first minute feels like the Calm & Smooth. Then your pilot spots a column of rising air — usually to the east, where the sun has been warming the volcanic rock since dawn — and banks into it. The glider circles slowly, the horizon tilts, and you climb. You will feel the lift in your stomach first, then in your ears. On a strong thermal day, you gain two or three hundred metres without your pilot using any technique a passenger could not learn. What you are experiencing is not a ride; it is the thing pilots drive up the mountain for. The Premium Experience is long enough that you stop reacting to what is happening and start paying attention to how it is happening.

Below you, the Barranco del Infierno gorge cuts up into the Adeje mountains. To your right, the long arc of coast from Costa Adeje to La Caleta, marked by the white edges of the landing beach at Playa de Enramada. On a clear day, La Gomera sits on the Atlantic horizon, its volcano catching cloud. If the thermal is working, you will pass the altitude of the takeoff, looking down on the ridge you launched from. This is the view pilots describe when they talk about why they fly the south coast — a combination of mountain height, ocean proximity, and thermal reliability that exists in very few places in Europe, and almost nowhere else where the drive from hotel to takeoff is ten minutes.