TenerifeTravel Guide

Renting a car is genuinely convenient, and Tenerife is one of the cheaper places in Europe to do it — island firms such as Cicar and Autoreisen quote all-inclusive rates, and in low season a small car can start somewhere around EUR 30 to EUR 40 a day.

In Santa Cruz, the Mercado de Nuestra Señora de África is the island's larder and a genuinely handsome piece of 1940s civic architecture: ochre arches, a clock tower, and open patios that make the whole thing feel more like a cloister than a shed.

The good news is that the days out this article is built around are still unticketed.

The island's northeastern tip is a lost world: the Anaga mountains, cloaked in laurel forest of a kind that covered the Mediterranean basin before the last ice age, hide hamlets reached by heroic switchback roads.

Above the north coast, La Orotava stacks its old town up a steep valley — churches, formal gardens and the Casas de los Balcones, mansions dripping with tiered wooden galleries.

The island's calling card: small Canarian potatoes boiled in heavily salted water until their skins wrinkle and frost with salt, served with two sauces — mojo rojo, brick-red with paprika and chili, and mojo verde, sharp with coriander or parsley.

The MICHELIN Guide Spain & Andorra 2026 lists nine starred restaurants on Tenerife holding eleven stars between them, which the guide's own coverage notes is more than any other Spanish island.

Tenerife's best seafood is served within sight of the water.

In the wine country of the north around La Orotava, Tacoronte and Los Realejos, families open guachinches — informal, often garage-like eateries — to sell their own young wine alongside a short menu of home cooking: grilled pork, chickpea stew, eggs with chips.