Tenerife
Why go?
OK, time to spill the beans. There are parts of Tenerife you want
to go to and there are parts that are best left unseen. Those
hotels that we feature are in the right places, so have no fear!
The cities up north – the capital, Santa Cruz, and the old
university town of La Laguna – are great fun, and inhabited
by locals who know how to throw a party; the carnival in Santa Cruz
is considered second only to Rio. Half of Tenerife’s 850,000
population live in these two cities and while it’s easy to
think of the island as remote, Santa Cruz has all the trimmings of
a big city: fancy shops, museums and concert halls, an orchestra, a
football team, hundreds of bars and restaurants.
Far and away the prettiest area on the island is the north west
corner. While much of Tenerife is ringed by an ugly motorway, the
mountains of this far-flung enclave have proved its undoing. Here,
the pace of life here is slow, peace prevails, and the landscape
remains gloriously untouched; most of what is special about
Tenerife is here. A rocky coastline gives way to rising mountains
with a thin strip of lush farm land in between that’s crammed
with banana plantations (it’s not uncommon to get stuck
behind an old 1950s truck overflowing with bananas). Pico del
Teide, Spain’s highest mountain lies to the south, the
Atlantic lies to the north. You’re miles away from the dreary
resorts of the south, but if you want to get up to Santa Cruz,
it’s less than a 1-hour drive.
Any Downsides?
Tenerife is quite a big place with a population of nearly a million and the roads of the north east (where most people live) are busy. The mountain roads of the north west are not for the faint-hearted, with hair-raising, hair-pin bends; they are, however, very beautiful. The big three resorts line up one after the other on the south coast. They are Costa Adeje, Playa de Las Americas and Los Cristianos. A little further north you come to Los Gigantes and Puerto de Santiago, which likewise have been taken over by the tourists.