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.