Spain
Tenerife
We visited in March
Tenerife's reputation gets off the plane with everyone else: Brits abroad. It does not have to be that holiday. The island is working hard, and well, to make room for every kind of traveller, and the reason to come is still winter sun at the end of a short flight from the UK. Teide sees to the weather. Spain's highest mountain, at 3,715 metres, keeps the trade winds and their cloud on the north side, and the south, in its lee, stays dry, with winter days of 18 to 23°C. We went in late March, as that season ran out. Not everyone on the island is glad of the company. Marches against mass tourism have filled the streets of the Canaries under the slogan Canarias tiene un límite - the Canaries have a limit - and we think some British visitors now weigh that before they book.
Stay on Costa Adeje, and leave the hotel to eat, because the restaurants are what has changed. It took one day to find the proof: SEEN, the Portuguese chef Olivier da Costa's beach club on the Atlantic at La Caleta, with seafood and a grill. The Trattoria at the Royal Hideaway Corales, the more relaxed sister of Il Bocconcino, settled it with fresh pasta and pizza. Then the hotels on this coast turned out to be as exciting as the restaurants, which here is saying something. The cloud the south is spared ends up on the North Coast, the other Tenerife: cooler and greener, with Puerto de la Cruz, the older resort town, and the Orotava Valley's banana plantations running down to black sand.
The best of our days began on Teide and ended on the coast, under a paraglider. From up there the island explains itself: the volcano in the middle, and the ravines running down from it to the hotels along the shore. A paraglider only goes down, so the rest of the island is a drive. The national park and the Las Cañadas caldera are about an hour up from Costa Adeje, and the cable car near the summit wants tickets booked ahead. Masca takes 45 minutes to an hour, down a narrow switchback road into the Teno massif, past the cliffs of Los Gigantes.
Wherever the car goes, park it where it is allowed. We got a ticket, and paying it took half a day of local bureaucracy, which is a poor exchange for half a day of March sunshine.
- Best months
- April to June, or September to November
- Avoid
- July and August, when the south is at its most crowded, prices rise and the heat makes inland hiking uncomfortable
- Nearest airport
- Tenerife South (Reina Sofía, TFS)
- Transfer
- 15-20 minutes to Costa Adeje
Neighbourhoods
- Santa Cruz and La Laguna
- Teide and the Highlands
- Anaga
Where to stay
3 hotels
3 hotels
Grown-up & familyBahía del Duque
££Tenerife, Spain
A colonial village of pastel houses and red-tiled turrets stepped down through palm gardens to the sand at Costa Adeje, with a Michelin star waiting at Nub.
Grown-up & familyGran Hotel Taoro
£££Tenerife, Spain
Agatha Christie stayed in 1927; fifty years after it shut, Spain's first grand luxury hotel is open again on its hill above Puerto de la Cruz, between the Atlantic and Teide.
Family-friendlyRoyal Hideaway Corales Suites
£££Tenerife, Spain
A heated pool out on the terrace of a two-bedroom suite, the Atlantic beyond it, on Tenerife's black-sand south coast, four hours from a London winter.
Where to eat
6 restaurants
El Rincón de Juan Carlos
££££ · Recommended
Costa Adeje and the South Coast · Canarian, creative tasting menu
Juan Carlos Padrón's tasting menu of reinvented Canarian classics, forty metres above the Atlantic on the resort's top floor.
Reviewed in the Michelin Guide and Guía Repsol
Il Bocconcino by Royal Hideaway
£££ · Recommended
Costa Adeje and the South Coast · Modern Italian
A Carbonara 3.0 and Il Tortellino lead Niki Pavanelli's modern Italian menu, overlooking the ocean and volcanic gardens.
Reviewed in the Michelin Guide
M.B
££££ · Recommended
Costa Adeje and the South Coast · Contemporary Spanish, tasting menus
Erlantz Gorostiza cooks Martín Berasategui's tasting menus from the island's best ingredients, in a glass-fronted dining room at Abama.
Reviewed in the Michelin Guide
San-Hô
£££ · Recommended
Costa Adeje and the South Coast · Japanese, Peruvian and Canarian fusion
Two tasting menus mix Japanese, Peruvian and Canarian cooking on a terrace with panoramic Atlantic views.
Reviewed in the Michelin Guide
