Tenerife – a hiker’s dream

Don’t get the wrong idea:  the glamour granny hasn’t suddenly had a change of heart, gone out to buy a rucksack and a pair of hiking boots and chucked her Manolos and Louboutins out the window. Oh no, but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate a breath taking landscape which looks wilder than the surface of the moon and offers paths and incentives for hikers which will be difficult to equal anywhere else in the world. Where is this  marvel of nature to be found?

The answer is in Tenerife, the biggest of the  seven  Canary islands, located in the Atlantic Ocean, just approx. 115 km west of the Western Sahara coast of Africa and a lot closer to that continent than to Spain to which the islands politically belong. All islands are of volcanic origin and Tenerife boast the 3750m high Teide, an active volcano which currently isn’t spitting anything into the air, but…you never know.

Volcano Teide with bits of snow year around

Teide and other volcanoes on the island are responsible for the landscape, the black lava plateaus  where nothing grows, the extremely fertile Orotava valley which Alexander von Humboldt called one of the most beautiful valleys on earth (and he has seen a few) and the weird and steep rock formations which surround the mountain and dominate all of the north and northwesters part of the island.

Formations in the National Park

You get an idea what hiking is like here

Great part of the area is a national park and has been declared a World Heritage Site. I had started my visit to Tenerife in the south and couldn’t get out fast enough. Just one tourist resort after another, identical to anywhere else in the world but without the beaches or rather what beaches there are are black. Not because they are dirty but because it’s all pulverized lava or lava pebbles. I found that extremely depressing, so, on the second day, I turned my attention to the better things of the island.

Puerto Santiago one of the tiny black beaches

Which came in the form of a day tour by coach, one of the few I have ever been on and absolutely wonderful. We started in Los Gigantes, then went further along the coast to pick up more passengers as far as Los Christianos when we finally turned inland toward the Teide National Park.

From approx. the middle of the park, the famous hiking path starts right to the top of the volcano. It’s ‘only’ 8.5 km, but what kilometers they are. Our guide told us, that many hikers start the climb in the afternoon, then spend the night in a cabin half way up and set off the next morning to reach the peek just when the sun rises. I can imagine that that’s a fabulous spectacle. For less energetic souls there is also a cable car which goes up and down, but during this tour there was no time.

Then we proceeded further north through the Orotava valley with its endless banana plantations, also famous for Canary tomatoes and potatoes, and then headed west to a small village called Masco, glued to steep mountains and again, the beginning of a hiking path which winds along a deadly  ravine and ends at the sea by a little bay which can only be reached on foot or by boat.

The road from Orotava to Masco and from there back to the south coast makes Nepal and the Moroccan Atlas mountains look pale by comparison. Let’s just say: a split second of distraction and you are history. You go: ohhhh all the time.

A wonderful trip even without the hiking and this morning I made my way to the capital, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, a charming town which I will tell you about in my next post.

Always colorful, the local costume

Tags: adventure holiday, canary island resorts, hiking in tenerife, teide history