Tenerife; Saturday, 12 March, 2016

If sunset was a quick affair, sunrise was even quicker, and with a West facing hotel window a pretty blinding affair due to the lightweight curtains. Consequently, I was showered and down in breakfast not long after 8am.

I headed back down to the Plaza de España and to the tourist information centre to see if there were any coach or bus tours to the Volcanic parts of the island. I was in luck as there was a tour with a space left leaving at 11am, so I quickly booked on and, given there was lying snow in the mountains, headed back to the hotel to pick up a light jacket.

The tour headed off on time and was pretty soon climbing, something we would do for much of the day given Santa Cruz is at sea level and the peak of Mount Teide is nearly 4,000m. The landscape on Tenerife is stunning, and apparently very predictable. Up to 1000m it’s a fair mix at which point the Canary Pines start, they grow only between 1,000 and 2,000m above sea-level with those points being almost exact and at just around 1,000m sure enough the pines started.

At 1,500m we passed through the top of the clouds and shortly afterwards made our first stop of the morning on a viewpoint looking across to the summit of Mount Teide and down on a sea of clouds, with just the highest peaks of Gran Canaria visible above the cloud level.

We continued to climb and, as predicted, at 2,000m the pines shrunk away to very stubby trees and then disappeared completely as we entered the Teide National Park and its bizarre moon like appearance with old lava fields and magma plugs punctuating the landscape.

The heaviest snow in 15 years had fallen a couple of weeks earlier, and consequently the mountains were heaving with locals not used to such conditions. It consequently made the going slow, and with a couple of people on the tour off of cruise ships who had to be back in Santa Cruz on time, it meant there wasn’t time for us to take the cable car up to the very summit of the mountain, but we got very close.

Having taken in the views of the magma plugs, left over from long since eroded Volcanos and more of the lava fields we started to head back towards Santa Cruz, stopping at a very nice restaurant for a late lunch, before taking a different route back down to sea level near Puerto de la Cruz, again marvelling at the preciseness of nature – Pines starting at 2,000m; clouds at 1,500m; Pines stopping at 1,000m.

As it was still relatively early I picked up the tram in Santa Cruz and caught it out to the end of the line in La Laguna, the former capital of the island to have a look around there.

I had a long wander through the town, taking in the sites and stopping at the towns very interesting museum before the sun started to set and I took that as my cue to catch the tram back into Santa Cruz for a much lighter dinner than the evening beforehand and then bed.