Spain has an island where people speak entirely through whistles, full sentences travel across kilometres of mountain valleys, and every child still learns the language in school

• On a small, mountainous island in the Canary archipelago off the coast of northwest Africa, an entire community still communicates using nothing but whistles.
• The island is called La Gomera, and the whistled language, known as Silbo Gomero, can carry a full sentence across several kilometres of deep mountain ravine, far further than the human voice could ever travel.
• It works by replacing every vowel and consonant of Castilian Spanish with a distinct whistling sound, distinguished by pitch and whether the sound is continuous or interrupted, allowing practised whistlers to convey more or less a