Tenerife - A Holiday Paradise

Tenerife: photo, Laurie Smolenski

by Laurie Smolenski

Endless banana plantations that stretch like seas of elevated green palms, black sand beaches populated by happy nude families, perilous narrow unnamed mountain roads…This is Tenerife. It’s drinking cold, cheap Dorada beer in a ramshackle roadside café amongst kind, crooked-toothed natives. It’s exploring caves and climbing cliffs; it’s the beastly Teide volcano. It’s an island paradise located in the Canary chain off the coast of Africa.

Tenerife is also the crowded patchwork of innumerable high-rise resorts and lackluster highways, crammed with rented cars and pink-faced visitors. Tenerife’s urban areas, in my experience, are mind-numbing tourist meccas polluted by overdevelopment and congested beaches. Strips of tacky shops offer beachwear and tacky magnets and bad food advertised in six languages, pumped with neon and swarming with Germans and grandparents. (My boyfriend Nicholas, whom I traveled there with, repeatedly referred to Puerto de Santa Cruz as Grand Senior Station). City life in Tenerife shines with the chlorinated cerulean of hotel pools and the glint of cheap jewelry sold on the street and, let’s face it, you can find that anywhere.

If you make our mistake of renting a hotel in the center, Tenerife may also mean waking up to the squawk of old lady tourists rattling about pie-el-ah at nine in the morning, layered with the crunch of construction cranes building the island’s millionth hotel across the street. With this in mind, my advice for anyone visiting Tenerife is twofold. Initially, avoid the touristy downtowns like dysentery. (Of course, if lush foliage, deserted beaches, and rugged seaside precipices just aren’t your thing, head south with your sunblock to the renowned Los Cristianos and Las Americas).

Secondly – Rent. A. Car. For twenty five euros a day, or sixty for three, you’ve got yourself a set of wheels and access to endless mountains, costal cliffs, caves, and a volcano. Our first morning on the road we explored the northeast end of the island, navigating tiny, precipitous costal roads. We discovered the small town of San Andrés, where banana farmers build their houses by hand and collect and store their own water. From there, we hiked up rocky shores until we met good-natured fishermen snacking on bags of bananas, thirty minutes from the nearest accessible roads. (The small, sweet bananas grown in the Canaries taste delectably coconut-infused).

Just east of Santa Cruz, the island’s capital, we followed signs for beaches that didn’t appear on our map and narrow roads led us to a lovely little cove. “There are naked people down there,” murmured Nicholas, an American not yet accustomed to Spain’s penchant for nude beaches, as we parked our two-door rental. Below us glistened Las Gaviotas, a crescent-shaped black sand oasis.

Against the orchestra of crashing waves, we spent a heavenly afternoon lounging at this hidden gem, sparsely populated by handsome young people and a few families. While some folks wore bathing suits, Nicholas got a kick out of a father and son playing paddleball, both naked and grinning. Behind the soft ebony sands rise jagged cliffs covered in desert plants and violet flowers. When the beach fell into late afternoon shadows, we watched the sun set behind those crags, leaving a buttery luscious trail of magenta in its path.

At the mouth of the beach we stumbled upon a weathered cliff-side café. Its hand-painted sign proclaims “Casa de Charly”; it is little more than a large shack with rickety tables and red plastic chairs. Flowers and toys hang from the thatched-straw ceiling, and succulents in terra cotta pots line every ledge. Behind the bar, amidst baskets overflowing with tropical fruits, an old woman was chopping vegetables and flipping tortillas when we arrived. She was strong and beautiful with steel-grey hair, golden skin, and plaid apron dress. Her sidekick, a smiling blond waiter, reminded me of a Ken doll. A mother-son duo, perhaps? Their menu was deliciously simple – fish, huge slices of rustic tortilla, bread, tomato salad, fresh fruit. Dogs begged for scraps while sun-tanners dined lazily on sardines, leaving towering plates of bones picked clean.

Sunburned and eager for adventure, we spent the next day driving from Puerto de La Cruz in the north, to the island’s southern tip. The rugged TF-82 road itself is worth a visit from mainland Spain. Two lane highways of shoestring width wound higher and higher in the mountains until we found ourselves literally in the clouds, surrounded by green hills, forests and very few road signs. Everything was gilded in a hazy mid-morning fog and only when the clouds parted could we glimpse the road climbing way across the ravine, seemingly days away.

Tenerife is amazing because of the diversity of its terrain and plant life. One moment we would be surrounded by dense, low-lying tropical brush and suddenly, climb a few meters higher into thickets of pines. After a treacherous ascent of about an hour, the road began to dip unexpectedly. The clouds faded again and we gazed open-mouthed into an immense open space.

The scene was unforgettable – lush, lime-green valleys bursting with yellow flowers, yielding to incalculable rolling hills. It was the closest I’ve come to anything out of The Land Before Time. The sight was in view for barely a minute before the road curved inward; I couldn’t immortalize it in a photograph because there was no place to stop the car. That moment was Tenerife as I’ll always remember it – idyllic, prehistoric, mystical.

---Published 2008-04-09

Laurie Smolenski

Topics: escape

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