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.