Erupting in popularity
The volcanic island of Tenerife is home to delightful winter sunshine, quaint old villages and bucket list hotels
OUR plane swoops below the clouds that surround the dark volcano. Below us, lights shimmer and glint into infinity. The volcano, the world’s third-highest, is Teide, and the lights are those of Los Cristianos.
Tenerife, the same size as Co Wicklow, is home to nearly a million people.
For an island only 85km long, its climate often depends on which end you go to. Warmest in the south, where the best beaches are found, it’s cooler and wetter in the north, especially during winter. The sand on the beaches is black, which comes from living beneath a volcano, but there’s no need to worry — the last significant eruption was in 1798 and nowadays cable cars take you to the lip of the crater. The trip costs €40 for an adult and €20 for a child.
Our taxi from the south airport to Adeje, in streaming motorway traffic, takes 35 minutes and costs €50. Our destination is Royal Garden Villas, a stunning resort, where each of the 27 villas has its own small but personalised swimming pool. It’s bucket list territory.
These villas are stacked ingeniously on the side of a cliff that overlooks the distant ocean. The result is a €30 million triumph of architecture on three levels, cut out of the bare rock face, with a full spa, a gym, an outdoor infinity pool with views to the ocean, an excellent restaurant and several bars.
Royal Garden Villas is managed by Fiona McAndrew, once a pupil of Roddy Doyle’s in Greendale Community School, Ballybrack, Co Dublin. Fiona, a fluent Spanish speaker, tells us that Irish people have really discovered Royal Garden Villas this last year. She arranges for us to rent a car for our short stay at a little over twice the cost of our airport taxi. We take off next morning to check out the island.
The northern coast, with its forests and greenery, is hillwalker country. The neighbouring cities of Santa Cruz and La Laguna — with their period buildings, paved streets and busy cafes — recall a colonial past.
We’re told that the annual Carnival in Santa Cruz, which kicks off for over four weeks each January and February, is the second biggest in the world after the one in Rio.
Just because it’s a small island doesn’t mean you can buzz around Tenerife before lunch. The two-lane motorway system is frequently congested and when you get off it, the congestion often gets worse. ‘Stay close to Fiona,’ becomes our catchphrase.
Fiona recommends we visit the old coastal town of Alcalá, 20 minutes to the north of Royal Garden Villas. This turns out to be a lovely old place with a little harbour with a south-facing seawall, much favoured by the locals as a place to swim.
Black soft-shell crabs flee from the steps down to the ocean and the sea temperature is 22 degrees. Long promenades, rising and falling with the contours of the cliffs, are a feature of this part of the coast. In Alcalá, a climb from the harbour leads to a succession of little cafés with horseshoe-shaped beaches below them.
Our sunny terrace with its private swimming pool is tough to leave — piña coladas at lunchtime must mean we’re on holiday.
The restaurant in Royal Garden Villas is excellent, but on holidays it’s good to get out at night or you feel you’re missing something. In La Caleta, on the sea, a fiveminute taxi ride away, we find La Vieja, a seafood restaurant situated right above the ocean. Pan-fried John Dory and glasses of the famous local white wine, Trenzado, don’t break the bank.
Next day we’re headed for Los Gigantes on the west coast. The name means The Giants, and refers to cliffs that come out of the ocean to a height of between 500-800m. There’s also a town called Los Gigantes, and a beach right under the cliffs, but the signs warning of rockfalls puts us off.
We drive home to Fiona and order mojitos by the pool.
Tenerife is renowned for golf, especially on the north coast, where the Seve Ballesteros-designed Buenavista
Golf hugs the wild ocean. In the calmer, south coast waters, jet skiing, kayaking and scuba diving are all popular. From Los Cristianos, whale watching tours cost around €40 per person.
Adeje is calm, modern, upmarket, relatively uncrowded, and its beaches clean, especially the beach at El Duque, where synthetic processes have been used to turn the sand white.
Canarian food and wine are excellent. Try Papas Arrugadas, small potatoes boiled in salt water and served with Mojo, a delicious herb sauce. Tenerife produces good cheese, especially goat’s cheese. Garbanzada a lo Canario is chickpea stew with pork.
The local wines we tried and liked the best were El Sitio, El Crater and Los Loros for red; and Humboldt (sweet dessert wine), La Araucaria (dry organic wine) and Trenzado 2016 for white.
We’ll be back.