Teide National Park

Teide National Park covers the high heart of Tenerife: a vast volcanic caldera, Las Cañadas, and the cone of Teide rising out of it to 3,718 metres, the highest point in Spain. Measured from the ocean floor, Teide is one of the tallest volcanoes on the planet, and together with its neighbour Pico Viejo it forms the only pair of peaks in the Canaries above 3,000 metres. The park was declared in 1954, received the Council of Europe's diploma for protected areas in 1989, and became a World Heritage Site in 2007 for both its scenery and its value as a record of how oceanic islands evolve.

Most visitors come for the landscape, which looks unlike anything else in Europe. Lava flows of different ages lie across the caldera floor in black, brown and rust; the plain of Ucanca stretches flat and pale beneath the peak; the eroded rock towers of the Roques de García stand like sculptures beside the road; the pumice fields of Minas de San José look lunar. The resemblance is not only poetic — the park's terrain is so close to that of Mars that ESA and NASA have tested instruments and rovers here. On a ridge east of the peak sit the telescopes of the Teide Observatory, where the sun shines nearly 3,500 hours a year.

Life has adapted to an environment of intense sun, cold nights and little water. The most famous plant is the Teide bugloss, whose red flower spikes can reach three metres in May and June; the white-and-pink Teide broom covers the slopes, and the Teide violet grows almost at the summit, making it the highest-flowering plant in Spain. Of the 168 vascular plant species recorded, 33 grow only on Tenerife, and many of its invertebrates occur nowhere else. For the aboriginal Guanches the mountain was sacred — they called it Echeyde and believed it was a gateway to the underworld — and archaeological sites have been found across the park. Beside the Parador of Las Cañadas stands a small chapel to Our Lady of the Snows, the highest Christian place of worship in Spain.

Getting there

The park lies in the centre of Tenerife, in the municipality of La Orotava; the nearest town is Realejo Alto, about 12 km away as the crow flies. Tenerife South Airport (TFS) is about 27 km away. Morning and afternoon coach trips run into the park from the tourist towns of the south.