Gran Hotel Taoro

For nearly three decades the Gran Hotel Taoro took people's money without offering them a bed: from 1979 the Cabildo of Tenerife ran it as a casino. It had opened in 1890 on the hill above Puerto de la Cruz as Spain's first grand luxury hotel, and in 1893 the French architect Adolph Coquet bent it into a U with two new wings. Agatha Christie stayed in 1927 and put the island into The Man from the Sea. In 1975 the hotel shut. It reopened in 2025 behind the same neoclassical front, with 199 rooms in whites and neutrals, hung with work by the Canarian artist Alejandro Tosco. Each is sold by its view: the French gardens, the Atlantic, or Teide, which has been there longest.

Recommended for anyone who would rather stay on Tenerife's north coast than its south, and will plan a day round dinner. At LAVA, Erlantz Gorostiza cooks over fire for eighteen, six of them at a counter in the kitchen and none of them under twelve; at OKA, Ricardo Sanz keeps an omakase bar for five and a terrace for the sunset. Families get cots, connecting rooms and a children's pool beside the two heated ones for adults, though no kids' club. Guests praise the gardens, and Teide as seen from the pool. A free shuttle runs 1.2 kilometres down the hill into Puerto de la Cruz, for the old town's wooden balconies and the black sand of Playa Jardín. The casino went down too, to an island in César Manrique's saltwater lake at Lago Martiánez, so a bet after dinner now means following it.