Masca Gorge

From a cluster of houses perched on a ridge among palms, a narrow cleft drops through dark volcanic rock all the way to the Atlantic: Masca Gorge cuts through the Teno massif in the north-western corner of Tenerife, a world of sheer walls, tight bends and layered basalt far removed from the island's resort coasts. A path roughly eight kilometres long follows the gorge from the village of Masca down to a small beach at its mouth.

The Teno massif is a volcanic block built in the Miocene from countless basaltic lava flows. In the walls of the gorge these flows are clearly visible as thin, steeply tilted layers, most less than a metre thick, often of rough, scoriaceous rock. They are cut through by swarms of dykes, sheets of once-molten rock that forced their way up through cracks and now stand out as dark ribs across the cliffs. One feature has a name of its own among geologists: the Masca unconformity, a band of jumbled breccia ten to fifteen metres thick that tilts steeply northward and marks a break in the long history of eruptions that built the massif.

The village at the top sits at about 650 metres above sea level within the municipality of Buenavista del Norte. It was a Guanche settlement before the Castilian conquest of the island in 1496 and today has fewer than a hundred residents, its houses scattered along spurs of rock among cypresses and palms. The descent to the sea typically takes around three hours, passing from terraced slopes into a narrowing canyon where the walls close in overhead before opening onto the shore, about ten kilometres from Tenerife's north-western tip.

Getting there

The gorge begins at the village of Masca in the municipality of Buenavista del Norte; the town of Guía de Isora is about 12 km away in a straight line. The nearest airport is Tenerife South (TFS), about 39 km away in a straight line, with the route by road through the west of the island.