Tenerife was high on my bucket list. It checks so many boxes for a great vacation destination. Tenerife has beautiful natural areas with amazing hiking trails. There are also great beaches, some with black volcanic sand and others with more typical golden sand. In addition, Tenerife has dramatic coastlines with cliffs that overlook the waves as they crash into the black volcanic rock below.
The island itself is basically part of Mount Teide, a cone that rose out of the Atlantic Ocean to a height of 12,000 feet above sea level millions of years ago. The height of Mount Teide has a significant effect on storms as they roll across the island. Because of that, Tenerife has multiple microclimates where some areas are lush forests, and others are arid deserts.
The climate of Tenerife is warm but mild, with winter temperatures in the low 70s and summer highs in the mid-80s. With its temperatures and natural beauty, Tenerife is an ideal vacation spot and has become a favorite destination for Europeans. This means a variety of bars and restaurants that are built to appeal to the tastes of European visitors, not American visitors (ie, Doner Kabab instead of McDonald’s, British pubs instead of Margaritaville, Neopolitan pizza instead of Domino’s)
In other words, we would have the opportunity to hike in a variety of landscapes, lie in the sun on the beach, and enjoy some great food we don’t normally get to eat. Because of this, I was really excited about the opportunity to visit, and I had made an impossibly long list of places to hike, beaches to visit, and restaurants to try. I was pretty jazzed.
We were checking the weather before the trip, and I kept seeing rain in the forecast. I assumed that meant that there would be a little rain each day and the rest of each day would be sunny. After all, we chose an Airbnb in Costa del Silencio, a town on the south end of the island in the desert. There is no way that it’s going to rain for the entire time we are there, right? Honestly, I didn’t even give it a second thought.
When we landed in Tenerife, Jenn checked the weather as we approached the gate and said that it looked like it was going to rain all day and for the next few days. What? We’re in the desert, how is this possible? I opened up Instagram, and there was a post from UTMB, an ultra-marathon organization that had a race on the island while we were there, which said they had canceled the event due to blizzard conditions on Mount Teide. Wait – what is going on?
What was happening was Tropical Storm Therese. This storm was a typical tropical storm, with an eye and galaxy-like spiral arms protruding from the center. Therese had parked itself in the Atlantic off the coast of Spain and Morocco and was rotating counterclockwise. What that meant for us was a bunch of heavy storms hitting the island from the south with high winds and heavy rain. On Mount Teide, that rain turned to snow that was heavy enough to shut off all roads up to the peak.
By the time we landed, made it through passport control, picked up our rental car, and made it to our Airbnb, it was late afternoon, and the rain had become fairly spotty. We picked up some groceries, went for a walk along the coast, and then went on to eat dinner at a little restaurant in Costa del Silencio called El Bojito. Later in the evening, we went for a couple of drinks at Black Sheep, a bar with a great selection of Belgian beers. On the walk home, the skies opened up, and it downpoured. We got completely soaked.
The next morning, we woke up to heavy storms and winds. Looking over the list of things I wanted to do on this trip, so much of it was out of the question – Playa de los Americas – rainy, hiking trails – soaked, Mt Teide – unreachable due to snow. I checked to see what the weather was like in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, which was only an hour drive from Costa del Silencio. It was going to be partly cloudy with a chance of showers. That sounded much better, so we drove up the coast to Santa Cruz.
We spent the early part of the day walking along the waterfront in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. We checked out the Auditorio de Tenerife, an auditorium designed by famed architect Santiago Calatrava, with a sweeping, concrete wave-like structure over the roof. Nearby the Auditorio was the Castillo de San Juan Bautista, a 17th-century fort, as well as the Casa de la Polvora, a former gunpowder warehouse dating to the 18th century.
Following our walk around the waterfront, we moved to Playa de las Teresitas, where we sat on the beach for a little while. The wind from the storms was blowing hard along the beach, and many people picked up their beach towels and headed to their cars. The weather was uncomfortable enough to thin out the crowds, but we stayed a little while, enjoying some refreshments from the snack bar. Our patience paid off, and we were able to enjoy some relatively sunny, albeit windy, conditions on the beach.
We decided to leave the beach and head to a 100 Montaditos in Candelaria. 100 Montaditos is a chain restaurant serving tiny sandwiches for low prices. I’m under no illusion that this is five-star food; it’s just a fun place where you can order a whole bunch of different mini-sandwiches and a couple of beers, and it’s not going to cost a lot of money. It’s a lot of fun, as long as you don’t take it too seriously. The best part, however, was that across from 100 Montaditos was Playa del Punta Larga, a gorgeous black sand (and pebble) beach. We wandered around it after dinner for a while and made a mental note to return when it was midday.
The next day we woke up and checked the weather, and sure enough, rain on the south side of the island. At this point, I looked at a weather map and noticed something – as the rain approached from the south, the rain made it to Mount Teide, dumped its rain and then, for the most part, had dry weather on the north side.
I said that we should go hiking in Parque Rural de Anaga. It was in the north and should be dry all day. This was something I was really looking forward to. After an hour and 15 minutes of driving, the last bit was stressful, with narrow roads, we came to a lot and found out that all of the trails were closed due to muddy conditions.
I was pissed. I definitely should have checked a website or made a phone call, but I didn’t. I just saw that the weather called for dry conditions, but it didn’t occur to me that it might have rained overnight. I realized I needed to give up my dreams of what I wanted this trip to be and just enjoy what we could. There would be no hiking on this trip, we were only going to be able to visit certain beaches that weren’t going to get soaked daily, and we were going to have to spend most of our time in the dry part of the island.
We did stay long enough for some coffee and for Jenn and Emma to try a barraquito, a coffee drink with licor 43, espresso, condensed milk, cinnamon, and lemon peel. We left Anaga Park and had lunch in Santa Cruz de Tenerife before heading to Playa del Punta Larga, which we had discovered the previous day, for a few hours of sunbathing and enjoying the ocean breeze. It was a lovely afternoon of relaxing and just enjoying a black sand beach.
The rest of the trip worked out the same way, with us doing what we could to stay away from the bad weather and enjoying what we could. On our final day, we were finally able to go to Playa de las Americas, the touristy part of Tenerife. Even on the calmest day of the trip in Playa de las Americas, the water was basically closed due to Jellyfish and heavy wind and waves. The weather, however, had finally broken to the point where that area was mostly sunny. While we were there, we talked to a shopowner who said that he had never seen more than two days in a row of rain in the twenty years he had lived in Tenerife, and this was the sixth straight day. We had been incredibly unlucky.
Out of the 20-30 items on my list of things to do in Tenerife, we had done maybe a half dozen. Most of them were made impossible by the weather. It was unfortunate. The thing was, we had just spent 5 days on an amazingly beautiful island, and while it wasn’t what I had hoped for, it was a great trip. Emma turned 21 on this trip, and Alex was a Junior in high school. They’re getting older, and I’m not sure how many more of these trips I can squeeze out of them, but I’m grateful for each one.
Our lives are always a little too full, a little too busy, a little too full of digital distractions. Somehow, when we are on vacation, like magic, we slow down, especially when we are eating or having a drink, to talk about our lives. We observe the differences between the culture we’re visiting and the culture at home. We learn about ourselves and gain insight into our lives. But most of all, we spend real, quality time with each other in a way that, for some reason, seems impossible at home.
So yes, I was disappointed. I was disappointed that we couldn’t hike the amazing trails in Parque Rural de Anaga. I was disappointed that I couldn’t take the cable car to the top of Mount Teide. I was disappointed that we didn’t get to spend an afternoon lying on the beach at Playa de las Americas. It was a great trip, though. I got to go to one of the most beautiful places on Earth with my three favorite people. You can’t beat that.
Newby to Expert Traveler 