The Northern Coast of Tenerife

Orotava

The Atlantic foamed and crashed on black lava rocks below, while above, the volcano El Teide slightly parted the thunder clouds to reveal a sweet blue. We were at the overlook where the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt had fallen on his knees at the view, which would still be wondrous were it not for the tracts of development below, where we were headed to Orotava.

Orotava is a lovely, well-to-do, Spanish city complete with tourist shops where fashion manikins dress in native peasant costumes and little canaries sing from their beautifully carved wooden prisons. The Canarian architecture is highly renovated, carved wood balconies and palmy courtyards rising 3, 4, 5 levels. Much rustic reconstruction--too much--only the Plaza San Francisco was genuinely charming with its shabby elegance.

Puerto de la Cruz

We proceeded to Orotava's original port, Puerto de la Cruz, which still bore resemblance to its fishing village origins in the old quarter. Rough black bricks sheltered an old harbor where truly artisanal goods were sold in a small market, but beyond, facing the lava beds of the coast, where the Atlantic crashed and foamed against the writhing black rock, were the hotels: grandiose, with large swimming pool decks, empty of any sunbathers.

However, the Puerto de la Cruz where we walked the old streets had more of a sense of humor: an obese woman in white face posed as a feathered angel with a feathered heart; another fairy in yellow gold perched apparently on thin air; a midget in white face in a baby carriage rocked back and forth to an hysterically funny sound track that mimicked crying. I laughed and laughed, and he met my smile, but as he kept rocking back and forth, he saddened. Nearby another midget sat in a wheelchair selling lottery tickets, looking totally depressed. But the ocean filled us with tranquility.

Garachico, beneath the volcano that destroyed it

Then we drove the coastal ridges to Garachico, at the ocean's edge, under the volcano that destroyed it in 1705.

"And the Bishop ordered spells to be cast as a result of the great roar of thundering, crashing and throbbing coming from under the earth..unceasing tremors with such roaring that it seemed as if firearms were discharging and hurricanes blowing to and fro..." --1704

We parked at a little square, causing a freshly shampooed little dog to bark his head off at us. By the old church Santa Ana, reconstructed after the Negro eruption, our path was blocked by a small film production. Like Puerto de la Cruz's church, Santa Ana was enormous and gray, square huge columns up to the carved wood vaults. A nearby Convent to San Francisco and Palaccio des Condes de Gomera had been reconstructed.

The castle survived, beneath the volcano

But at the water's edge a small castle, Castillio San Miguel, had survived the eruption and stood hard and quaint. The lava that had hardened in splashes in the ocean had become a paved waterfront park with bathing pools, along with a grand Olympic size pool that reflected the purple gold light of the setting sun. It was the place I would like to live on Tenerife, under the shadow of its nemesis.

We drove on dark winding mountain roads home, through clouds, in oncoming traffic and arrived to simply eat and pack. Despite an angry wind, the night was balmy and tender--Tenerife night, gentle hospitality, peerless sweet air.

Garachico's lava pools

El Teide, Sacred Volcano

Caldera de Las Canadas

The summits of Tenerife were formed one or two million years ago by now vanished volcanoes. More than 500,000 years ago a massive landslide destabilized them, and created La Orotava Valley, that stretches all the way down to the ocean. Then, around 170,000 years ago, another massive collapse crashed the summits down towards the sea, forming the huge basin (17 km in diameter) that is today Caldera de Las Canadas. Since then, volcanic activity continuing into the present has slowly filled the caldera. The Caldera has been a national park since 1954, presided over by the volcano El Teide. Teide rises to the highest point in Spain, 3,717.98 meters.

The aboriginal Guanches (approx. 4th c. AD-15th c. AD) raised livestock, and in search of pasture land, took their flocks to these summits during the summer. They used their faithful dogs to look after the herds. The dogs were even buried with them. Other archeological remains attest to their seasons among the volcanoes: huts, burial grounds, mummies, funerary utensils of obsidian and ceramics. They considered El Teide to be their Axis Mundi. It held up the sky.

It was also the sacred site of battles between the gods:

"Guayota appeared and captured Magec, the sun, leaving the sky in darkness...Guayota, with Magec his prisoner, hid in the bowels of Echyde (Teide). Achaman sought him there. And when he found him, the ground opened with thundering booms and tremors. From the crater of Echeyde, Guayota hurled smoke, burning rocks, slabs and boulders, burning clots. He also threw tongues of lava and streams of slag. The air and sky turned into a boiling quagmire, so ablaze with burning coals that it caused terror, until Achaman finally defeated him. As punishment for his wickedness he was locked forever inside of Echeyde." --fragments of the legend of Guayota

El Teide

Later, after the conquista by the Spanish, El Teide became a mandatory passage for scientific expeditions sailing to the New World. The only subtropical mountains in Europe, their flora and fauna are unique.

On the road to Teide we drove north, always upward, to where trees no longer grow. We were in the volcano's realm. The view was obscured by a haze--attributed to the "calima", sand from Africa. There were clumping broom plants and puffs of a tiny yellow flower, but mostly the tougher silhouettes of the earth's ancient dramas. The craters of countless volcanoes spread their hardened lava skirts all around. Sometimes only the cores remained, scarred in narrow ridges, balancing on air in improbable shapes, since the once-molten minerals are so incredibly hard. Near and distant, the shapes surround you, jagged roques and slices of digues.

Las Roques

Las Roques is a conglomerate that looks like Monument Valley, twisted, once-molten rock, of volcanic cores like La Cathedral. Like the American Southwest, it is an environment of reds and purples and sage greens.

Then we drove to the teleferico, or cable car, that ascends Teide from a cabin-like building. The shop had fashion mannikins posing as Guanches, and a plethora of tedious trinkets.

From the teleferico

We rode up to the crater of Teide, watching the shape of the Caldera take form beneath us as it receded, swirls of red and green and dark purple gray lava fields. The flows of lava are broken into gigantic chunks, from an eruption that took place in the Middle Ages lasting several decades. Black lava was thrown out from El Teide up to the current level. It is said that Dante's Purgatorio is based on the eruptions of this island.

fumaroles

In 1798 was the last eruption in the park's interior. On the sides of Pico Viejo (2,994 meters), a volcano near El Teide, a series of mouths opened which are called the nostrils of the Teide which, during three months, released enormous quantities of lava that created the badlands (malpaises) in the park.

At the top the air was icy. Sulphurous fumaroles of heated fumes (indicative of continuing activity inside the volcano) became frosty in the wind. The atmosphere at 13,000 feet was rarefied and clarifying. We walked on a rough path of rock and boulder.

on the crater

I leaped from surface to surface in my Vibrams toward Pico Viejo, which posed for us, but was still many hours' hiking away. The lava was mostly of monumental blackish obsidian and basalt, smooth as a sculptor's work, harder than any rock. And then, exhilarated by the atmosphere but fearing the chill, we took the opposite rocky trail over the caldera, with its nooks and fumaroles and overlooks, till we longed to be back in the little cabin of the teleferico. There we could watch the rocks as we descended, with more of a feel for their daily lives.

Pico Viejo

We drove on, past gleaming white observatory buildings, that looked like mosques and temples. A world meteorological headquarters is here, where there is no pollution and little ambient light. The "Law of the Sky" made the Canary Islands Astronomical Observatories an "astronomical reserve." In 1979 the Observatories in the Canary Islands were internationalized, and now more than 60 scientific institutions (belonging to Armenia, Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, the US, Finland, France, Italy, Mexico, Norway, the Netherlands, Poland, the UK, Russia, Sweden, Taiwan and Ukraine) work here.

Door in the rock, Bosque de l'Esperanza

We drove past what appeared to be huge drifts of many colored sands shading to black, which were lava flows, past numerous volcano craters, on to the Carretera dorsal, the ridge of land crowned by the Corona pine forest high above cities on the coast.

We were soon among the towering pines and eucalyptuses of the Bosque d l"Esperanza, that roared with the hollow forest wind.  Franco had assembled his supporters before the fatal coup in that forest, so we duly relieved ourselves to express our opinion of Franco.

Then down to Candelaria, for the moist and balmy ocean air. We still wanted to see the interior of the Basilica, with the famous doll--the statue of the Virgin who had washed ashore 100 years before the Spanish, and supposedly been worshipped by the Guanches--and the high altar with its monumental El Greco-like paintings. In the sunset, the surf pounded and foamed against the old Guancha chiefs, standing in bronze at the edge of the Atlantic.

The Northwest of Tenerife

Los Remedios, Buenavista

We jogged in the morning, I trying to make my way over fields of volcanic stone, cactus and small ravines cutting the earth. Then our hostess regaled us for 2 hours, with a very hard sell of a time share, which was finally easily deflected since she required an answer within hours. So we escaped, up the West coast north to Buenavista with its 15th c. white and dark stone church, Los Remedios, getting lost among concrete walls of forbidden banana fields, guarded by dogs.

Punto del Teno

From there we drove along the Punta del Teno--another protected masterpiece of nature, gargantuan cliffs of chiseled rock, deep rich volcanic brown, that seems ready to fracture over the ribbon of highway that borders the ocean, clinging to the dark walls above deep blue foaming breakers. Tunnels were even carved for this road, that leads practically to nowhere, but to quite somewhere: a black rocky abutment and lighthouse. Platforms had been built over the black volcanic park, of handsome gray stone with log paths for swimmers and divers and nude sunbathers in a protected cove. High black rocks plunged beneath the treacherous ocean, where they turned paler beneath the clear blue waters.

Swimming cove, el Teno

Places of power and majesty, difficult to leave behind. But we did, driving to the Massif of Teno, volcanic mountain bristling with heather and cacti and palms, which we again did not truly experience because we have no time to hike. In this corner of Tenerife volcanic eruptions have pleated the land with sharp ravines and rocky peaks like bubbly lava suddenly fixed in time and space, and the shadow of the valley is deep where the sun does not gild it. and all around the bubbling earth has shot upwards or split downwards.

Baracan

The Hill of Baracan is an intersection of old hiking paths between the ravines of Teno massif and the valley of El Palmar. This valley was formed by the eruption of the La Montaneta volcano a thousand years ago, turning a ravine into a lake, which turned into the Guanchas' forest that they used for goatherding. After the conquest the Spanish logged it to meet Tenerife's needs, and more recently enormous tranches of the fertile red earth were sliced out of hills to use in banana plantations. But still we heard the clanking of goat bells.

Masca

Quiet hamlets nestle into the ripples of mountain, like La Palma which has been forgotten, but in the next, lower, valley, Masca exploits her extraordinary location with terraces of restaurants and knick knacks for sale, and hiking paths that can take three hours among the powerful folds of mountain to the ocean, or up to the peaks.

This is a wildlife preserve, Teno Park, described by a placard:

Teno Park

"Tarucho the crow no longer knows where to go. He flies aimlessly, rising and falling on the wind, drifting. Here he finds safety, protected by deep ravines, sheer fock faces and inaccessible cliffs. A world of the air, tailor-made for a bird. He could fly to the bottom of the ravine, to Masca, or climb the coastal cliffs and try his luck hidden among narrow ledges. Or he could fly up towards the mountains or reach the fertile valleys of El Palmar where he can feast on the fruit of the strawberry tree. It is now long since Tarucho's forefathers flew the skies of Teno. Like many endangered species here, protected by the exceptional health of a rare ecosystem."

Santiago del Teide, 16th c.

It was so difficult to leave that play of glaring sunset and shadow, palms abundant in the sculpted peaks and valleys, to leave the red rock vantage points. But we did, and descended to Santiago del Teide with its 15th c church filled with life size mannikins of a handsome tragic Christ, and presumably Santiago on a life-size horse, but the priest was offering communion, so we moved on.

On the darkening road there was another bronze statue of a Guanche chief whose 200 goats had been stolen by a conquistador,his handsome, brave honor and fading hope in his tragic face.

And we drove on, whipping around banana fields as the sun went down.

La Laguna and the Northeastern Coast

La Laguna adjoins the larger port city of Santa Cruz with a tramway. Center of education, culture and religion, it is preserved by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site and vibrant capital since the 15th c. We drove there under a flawless sky with white fleece hanging just at the mountain tops. We took the long route, through Santa Cruz, which was lively in the sunny morning. Jugglers performed in front of traffic stopped at lights, prostitutes sat in their folding chairs just behind the market Nuestra Senora de Africa, street musicians warmed up under the sun. But San Cristobal de La Laguna was much cooler, closer, cleaner, streets of Spanish and medieval architecture, the Moorish Mudéjar style. It is unmistakably a colonial outpost, with the rough stone carved facades of aristocratic homes bearing family shields, while the real beauty is in the polished Canarian woodwork of massive doors and carved balconies.

La Concepcion, the oldest church in Tenerife, had high massive vaults of carved wood, gleaming ship-like vaults of the central nave, more Moorish and Canarian carved designs in parts of the ceiling, disks of faded paint. An elaborate cedar chair that curved upwards to deliver sermons seemed almost pagan with a large savage phoenix-like bird gripping a hoary spear in its cruel talons, seated on a globe entwined with a snake, with sacred paintings on the top of the chair.

The virgin of Tenerife looks like our Lady of Guadalupe dressed like Queen Elizabeth I, even when she holds the naked crucified Christ on her lap.

We climbed the dark stone tower of the 17th c, and viewed the green ridges and mountains while at our feet lay a grid of neat 18th c. streets. La Laguna had been the Capital, with her government buildings and grand mansions of the elite--including a Dutchman and an Italian who had come to help rule the colony, and whose decor reflected their origins. Villas had inner courtyards circled with Canarian wooden balconies, carved eclectically. The most beautiful and perhaps oldest building we saw was a red convent to San Augustin, with a forest in its cloister, next to the burnt remains of its church 's soaring vaults, and upstairs immense chambers of dark polished wood.

A Spanish tourist tried to photograph a chic, sleek woman but she put up a stern hand--No. He wanted to title it "La Laguna."

We drove out in the finally warm sun to the wooded northeast of the island, Las Mercedes Forest, in the Agana region. A virgin tangle of laurel and palm entwined with ferns, moss and vines, woven and matted so thickly the road sliced through it like hair rising from the head of the layered rock. Inside the cool thicket it was fragrant and moist. Logging has been forbidden since the 15th c. since the condensed fog on laurel leaves yielded four times the water for Tenerife as did the rain. It has the highest biodiversity in Europe.

We drove up to 1000 m and stopped at one mirador after another to view the pleats of green mountains and ridges of red rock bristling with sage, the steep ravines and lush green forests, and just beyond, the ocean where clouds wreathed the next island, Gran Canaria. Then down the treacherous hairpin road, recently built, through glaring sun and deep shade. We wound along the sheer edge overlooking jagged black peaks rising from a foamy ocean, down to Chamorga, a village of square white houses tumbling into the steep rock. From there hiking trails lead up the volcanic rock, and down to the sea. Pens of hunting dogs heralded our arrival and a little old pooch followed me till I pet him, The people had planted a forest of dragon trees, a prehistoric tree that is Tenerife's own.

Then we drove to the savage ocean, thundering around the black lava rock. We were headed for Taganana, famous for sea food, but comprising mostly muddy construction along precipitous roads. We got stuck at neighbouring Benijo where amidst mud and rubble and a lone farm animal lying, black and sleek, in a cabbage patch, there are reputable seafood restaurants from which drove elegant Spanish doňas. Then we drove back the hairpin turns of a ribbon of a road trimming the skeletal mountains. The ridges were worn down to the hardest veins of red ore, ribs jutting out of the shears of rock. Always in the distance we saw the great volcano El Teide, rising in the fog.

Taganana

It was sunset as we drove home on the autopista, along the glaring sea's edge, while windmills turned vigorously. A long long drive of a day that sharpened our appetite for Tenerife, for its many footpaths we have not taken, secret black beaches we have skipped, tropical forests we have not yet hiked, days we have missed in the matchless sun.

The Road to Santa Cruz

Arico Nuevo

Headed northeast in Tenerife, I drove through the arid clay and rock of land sliced through bouldered layers, and dropping steeply into barrancos; and through the folds of vertical and treacherous ravines where sometimes doors appeared in the side of the rock. 

A door at the bottom

Often there were door-shaped holes, but sometimes there were actual wooden doors fitted into the pale dry sediment, which sometimes connected with roofs on top of the embankment. There was little sign of people or cars, as I drove the hairpin curves of the interior and its waterless land, sometimes with dried grapevines, and terraced with muddy bricks.

Arico Nuevo

We stopped at Arico Nuevo, which had been new in the 18th c, when aristocrats of the island built these white adobe homes with their elegant tile roofs and imposing wooden doors, circling and nestling in ingenious relationship with the precipitous land. Along our drive was the Camino Real, a hiking sendero that traced the Marian triangle, which linked sites of the Virgin's apparitions (even before the Spanish arrival, they claim). Giant windmills marched to the sea, and further on they were still, until our drive home when like faceless clocks they twirled their three arms.

Church at Guimar

We descended into a more ruddy clay, moister and richer, through villages, where only a few grizzled old men in tatters scratched their stomachs along the main street. Then we entered an entirely different climate as the land turned to dark, purplish volcanic mountains, sprouting candelabra of slim cacti and we were driving through clouds. Chain mail held up the rock in placces.

Guimar has a view of the sea and so-called pyramids discovered by Thor Heyerdahl, who thought he had proved that the Guanchas were in touch with Mayan and Aztec cultures, but later scientists disproved his theory. The pyramids have given rise to an exquisite museum, though they had been discovered to be simply the folly of locals who loved those dark volcanic stones.

Candelaria

In Candelaria we descended again to the sea, where it is said that a statue of the Virgin washed ashore 100 years before the arrival of the Spanish, and was worshipped by the Guanchas, children of the volcano. Their own imposing, all-too-human likenesses stand in larger than life bronze statues against the beating shore with its black volcanic sand. The sea was calming to wade in, the gritty black sand seemed healing after all the twisting, hair-raising roads. The basilica, which dates form 1959, has what is said to be the original statue of the virgin, while a replica dominates the altar. We had fish soup and paella on a terrace of the church's plaza, and fed a hungry cat with the chunks of chicken that appeared in the fish soup.

Guancha chiefs, Candelaria

Then on to the big city, Santa Cruz. Like Cagliari it faces its port majestically, with daring architecture by Calatrava and its Plaza d'Espana with a rippling pond and tourist offices like volcanic hillocks planted with cacti. Santa Cruz is airy and tranquil, some quarters Spanish Baroque or grandiose Art Deco, others are low colorful adobe with cheerful terrace cafés and Canarian wooden balconies. The museum/library is a vast masterpiece, with reading rooms like modern cathedrals dripping with long ceiling lights.

Plaza d'Espana, Santa Cruz

The parks are enchanting. Principe des Asturias hs a dirt dog run around its Baroque cupola, and feels like an enchanted forest of lauriers and palms. On benches around the cupola sat strange marginal people--an obese woman sprawled on the lap of a watchful young man, a colorful, handsome hippy who looked like Chekhov, drinking tea from a miniature porcelain pot and sewing, next to his bicycle laden with belongings that resembled the paraphernalia of a clown. Another park envelopped us with its tropical forest and fragrant herbs--we could smell curry in the air.

Principe d'Asturias, Santa Cruz

Then we crossed an elegant bridge over a dry river to Our Lady of Africa, a carnavalesque outdoor market. The beautiful white and dark stone church with its high narrow square tower housed the original wooden cross planted at Santa Cruz, but it was closed. So we headed back in the sunset.

The Market, Santa Cruz

 

Arriving at Tenerife, Island of the Canaries

A Guancha

The Canary Islands--to the ancients, the Fortunate Isles, the Blessed Isles---were the Western limits of the known world, as well as a mythical realm where heroes went after death. Several hundred kilometers off the Western Sahara of Morocco, the archipelago was inhabited by a native peoples who are believed to have originated in the Atlas Mountains. Those Guanchas, children of the volcano, took centuries for the Spanish to conquer (15th-16th), and to wipe off the face of the earth. The Spanish ruled with hectic conflicts between Crown and aristocracy, exploiting the land and the peasants to exhaustion. Now the Canaries submit to another kind of invasion, European tourists, chief source of revenue and chief threat to their beauty. Still, half the land is protected from development and preserves the most extraordinary biodiversity in Europe.

We were there at the invitation of a time-sharing company, for a free week at a condo. To us, it was a chance to explore gorgeous Tenerife, while to our hostess it was a now or never hard sell.

The first morning we sit on the terrace at dawn, facing east toward the Atlantic, behind a silhouette of a small minaret, toward glowering purple clouds pushing upwards into the blanching sky. It feels like Morocco, the air sweet and unresisting except for gusts that flapped our curtains in huge balletic swirls all night. We can hear the sea, but we cannot get to it. We can barely see it, trapped as we are inside of this jolly fun-filled complex. But we have the air, the velvety night sky, the sweeping palm trees in a gusting wind. Streaks of woolly pink rise out of the purple croccodiles over the ocean.

It took hours, the day before, to arrive a few kilometers from the airport, where we waited an hour in line for our rental car. The water of the south of Tenerife is not potable, and an old skinny British guy in shorts wandering the airport offered me water, which he apparently collected from trash bins. Finally we drove the rental car, with the delectable air still so distant, around in circles, lost on the local roads, where fat Arab ladies walked and laughed, and at a bus stop sad brown Spanish Indians held each other. Costa Silencio is inhabited by British and German tourists, though. We drove round and round trying to find the beginning of our one way street, incessantly honked at by its "locals" (bossy tourists). A big man, his hair in dreadlocks, pushed his trolley of brooms and mops in the night, while his little white daughter skipped along.

The collection of condominiums of Costa Silencio are hotels or second homes.  Over the sunny central plaza where we stayed, each apartment has two terraces so everyone is living in plain sight, as if we dwell in the box seats of an Elizabethan theatre. The boxes of illuminated dining rooms show senior English couples dining in t-shirts with their bottles of red. Down at the restaurant, which we tried the first night, white wine was favored, in frosty-looking glasses, by lone pudgy ladies in brave sundresses, hosted and pampered by a jovial Brit, thick and meaty and unflappable. The menu was unmistakably British.

In front of our terrace

As the sun rises the strange fake brick paint on the complex seems like ill-chosen lipstick, while the soft yellow tan feels like Morocco, or the American Southwest. The abundance of palm trees seems like a Western luxury, for just 300km over the water is the Saharan desert where dates and palms take decades to mature. A dove's wings whistle as she flies closer to look at us. Now there are tiny birds on the slender but abundant arms of the huge cactus in front of me. Down the hall is another kind of Alhambra-like courtyard, where a huge palm tree sweeps the sky through the open roof, several stories above, surrounded by wooden tiers. We alone stir at this most beautiful moment, the splendour of the dawn, ocean's roar still audible as the sounds of life have not yet awoken.

Playas de las Americas

Now the condominium comes to life, and those who have just risen from bed go to the side of the pool to lie down again, with their mags and kindles. And we hit the road.

The southern island has been converted to a tourist haven by importing sand from the deserts of Morocco. At Los Christianos the sand is guarded from the open sea by a jetty of huge concrete blocks, where we walked and felt the vast Atlantic. A gargauntuan ferry spills over with people and cars emerge from the island of La Gomera. Being on this rough ocean is at once centering and frightening. I cringe before the fate of sailors. In Sardinia their old cottages faced away from the sea--no windows opened onto it.

Playas de las Americas

The beach of Los Christianos is Playa des Vistas, where rows of blue chaises sit empty under the cloudy sky, at the top of which the commercial thoroughfare consists of store fronts at the base of white adobe apartments climbing upwards, the cracked paint adding character. It has a rather British flavor, blokes along the tiered white building trying to make you a deal, reel you in, with their chummy leering faces. On offer are expeditions, whale-watching, folk concerts, restaurants, then you go through a tunnel to a village like the old Spanish turned tourist villages.

Playas de las Americas

Then we proceed anxiously to Playa de las Americas, the most commercial of all, but in fact even this ostentatious tourist trap had charm. From Las Vegan palaces to modest adobe shacks, everything was loudly on sale. But the walkways along the beach are beautiful, passing fronds of palms, sometimes boggy rock sand, nearly deserted on this cloudy day except for the footpath. Commerce, though, was brisk: a palatial McDonalds next to a rustic Café de Paris, Burger King and Bennetton, Dolce y Gabanna alongside cheap beach towels and umbrellas and candy. (One beach towel had an angel and a devil practicing different sexual positions for every month of the year.)

Then, under the hottest steamiest sun that re-launched my migraine, we took the road to Adeje, posh with upscale hotel palaces, theme parks (a huge Hindu Temple, a Tibetan temple, postmodern loopy Andalusian architecture, palaces of glass and metal) and finally through winding banana plantations (as hang gliders took off and drifted and landed close by), volcanic gravel, construction and unbuilt highways, up to the beauty of Los Gigantes.

Los Gigantes: Immense volcanic cliffs shelter an ancient sea, protected from the trade winds and the cold Canarian current. Microscopic animals and plants develop in profusion, creating an extraordinary sanctuary for whales, especially pilot whales, and dolphins, who find here an abundance of foodstuffs and deep waters into which to dive. The pilot whales spend their lives here, raising their young among the whole pod, making this an immense home in motion. Other marine creatures stop here on their migrations. Dolphins guard their babies beneath their fins for up to 4 years, until the next baby arrives. Boats offer to take you to see them, but the sly Spanish faces of those men betray no affection for such glories, so I wasn't interested.

Los Gigantes

On these arid rocky cliffs, giant lizards survive from other times, such as the speckled lizard, along with plants that can withstand the lack of water and high salt concentration, such as a member of the foxglove family. It is an exceptional tapestry of life, this western corner of Tenerife.

Guia de Isora

Back we drove through inland villages - Guia de Isora had a charming Renaissance church with its elongated Moorish/Baroque facade.

Finally in our own "village", we stopped at a Spar supermarket in the darkening evening, (beneath a shabby terrace where a black shepherd barked) and acquiesced to buying imported food and gigantic water bottles. We made our own simple dinner of salad and sardines and roasted aubergine, and soon to bed, amidst the karaoke wails from the plaza, the evening's entertainment of shameless nostalgia.