Tenerife tourist information - Canary Isles, Spain

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TENERIFE - Canary Isles information - Spain Tourism

With 2,057 square kilometres, Tenerife is the largest Canary Isle. The entire island is like a huge pyramid-shaped mountain, starting at the coast and rising to the centre, taking in the Caiiadas crater before reaching the top, el Teide.

Santa Cruz de Tenerife

In 1494 Fernandez de Lugo disembarked here and drove a cross into the ground, naming it the Conquest Cross. The city of the "Holy Cross" takes its name from this act. The port began to prosper in the eighteenth century, to the point that the city became capital of the Canaries, a status it maintained until 1927. Today it is capital of the Western Canary Isles. The architectural past of Santa Cruz, in terms of monuments, can be seen in La Concepción and San Francisco, two seventeenthcentury Baroque churches that were modified in the eighteenth
century.

The city has some charming parks, making street life all the more agreeable. The most notable of these, the Garcia Sanabria municipal park (inaugurated in 1927), is a veritable open-air museum of contemporary Spanish sculptors. The statues are the result of the International Sculpture Exhibition held in the city's streets in 1974. La Rambla del General Franco boasts Henry Moore's Goslar Warrior. Nearby is the Mujer botella by Joan Mire. Located in the former Hospital Civil, the Nature and Man Museum has two sections, explaining the islands' archaeology and natural sciences. SAN CRISTÓBAL DE LA LAGUNA, founded in 1497 by the captaingeneral Alonso Fernandez de Lugo and former capital of the Canary Isles, was once the largest city in the archipelago. The urban layout was originally planned with long straight streets that still exist, and the town has a unique old quarter, with both a Castilian and tolonial air, and a relaxed atmosphere. At the beginning of the twentieth century Unamuno stated that La Laguna is "dressed in a cassock or a monk's habit". From its times of splendour the town has kept its traditions and its festive spirit, very much in keeping with the university cities of old.

Even before it was named an episcopate, La Laguna was considered the religious centre of the island. The oldest church is Nuestra Senora de la Concepción, on which work began at the very beginning of the sixteenth century, combining Gothic and Mudejar styles. Its Gothic features have survived in the main front and the choir, and inside is the font used to baptise the Guanche chiefs. The San Francisco church, also from the

early sixteenth century, is home to the Cristo de la Laguna, a Flemish image from the fifteenth century donated by Fernandez de Lugo and which enjoys much devotion in the city, above all during the annual procession in September. The cathedral of Nuestra Senora de los Remedios is a twentiethcentury building, as the former temple was declared a ruin. The altarpiece of the Remedios chapel incorporated several Flemish panels from the sixteenth century, and the neo-classical main front is a copy of the Pamplona cathedral. The present-day Bishop's Palace, with a seventeenth-century main front, was originally the home belonging to a noble family. The sixteenth-century Santa Clara monastery has received official recognition as a historical-artistic monument. Many streets still contain mansions from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Calle Nava y Grimon has many old houses, though the largest number of buildings with Baroque fronts and Canaries-style courtyards can be seen between the Plaza del Adelantado and Calle Obispo Rey Redondo, where a large part of the city's most beautiful houses are to be found. One of the most charming civic buildings is the elegant Palacio de Nava, in a clear Baroque style. The beauty and character of the historical quarter have been recognised by UNESCO, when the area was declared a World Heritage site in 1999.

LA OROTAVA. Just as interesting as the town is its valley, given over to banana plantations and forests of a serene beauty. The San Benito convent (the present-day Museum of Latin American Pottery), which dates from the fifteenth century, and the eighteenth-century Baroque church of Nuestra Senora de la Concepci6n, are perhaps the monuments of greatest artistic interest, though next to them is the island's most interesting collection of popular architecture, with balconies covered in lattice work and courtyards with a definite Andalusian atmosphere. The Casa de los Balcones and Casa del Turista can both be visited.

El Teide

Every year two million people are attracted to this mountain, which stands 3,718 metres above sea level at its peak. The Guanches (the islands' original inhabitants) thought that the entire firmament rested upon it. It is not an isolated peak, but rather a series of volcanoes spread out in almost all directions. Its roots are banked deep down in the crater known as Las Caiiadas del Teide, with a spiral shape and measuring almost 16 kilometres on its longest side. El Teide was formed by successive volcanic eruptions, the last occurring in 1798. A year later Alexander von Humboldt, a truly exceptional traveller, descended into the crater far below a point any conventional traveller had previously gone, and felt how the sulphurous gas tore holes in his clothing. Despite the altitude and the sea of petrified lava, some surprising varieties of both flora and fauna can be found, many of them unique. Von Humboldt himself catalogued the Teide violet as an endemic plant. As well as 139 listed plants, there are other surprising aspects, such as the echium plant in bloom (in spectacular blues, whites and reds), the rock itself, and the intensity of colours due to the manganese content and the presence of obsidian.
The Izana observatory systematically analyses the chemical components of the air crossing el Teide, as well as checking ozone levels and assessing the greenhouse effect. El Teide is a national park of almost 19,000 hectares.

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