Tenerife: Saharan Sand, Carnival Streets

Last week was about going deeper into La Laguna's origin story, hiking Anaga from cloud forest to coastline, and taking our first evening in Santa Cruz. This week, the island showed us how public life gets built here, sometimes by geography and sometimes by sheer civic will, and how quickly Tenerife can shift from quiet routine to full-scale celebration.

We visited Playa de las Teresitas, the engineered beach north of Santa Cruz where 270,000 tons of Saharan sand were imported to transform a rocky shoreline into one of the most used public spaces in the Canaries.

On February 14, we moved into our second Airbnb, still in San Cristóbal de La Laguna, but now on a quieter street inside the UNESCO historic district. The change is subtle and immediate. The nights go still. The streets carry the old-city textures we keep returning to: stone, carved wood, courtyards, and the particular calm of places built for walking rather than driving.

It was also Valentine's Day, our first holiday abroad. We celebrated with dinner at La Abadía Gastrobar, set inside an old Canarian house on Calle Adelantado. The space is intimate and warm, with low lighting and the kind of quiet atmosphere that suits the occasion. We shared papas rellenas conejo (potatoes stuffed with rabbit meat), solomillo de cochino relleno (medallions of pork tenderloin served on chips with guava sauce), and a glass of local wine, followed by dessert and a cortado at Palmelita. It felt particularly meaningful given where we are in life. A first holiday in a new country, at a table we walked to, in a city we are beginning to know. That is worth marking.

The next day took us on a bus day trip along the north coast: first to Puerto de la Cruz for the botanical garden, the Agatha Christie steps, and a plant-covered side street; then onward to Icod de los Vinos for the ancient dragon tree, a banana farm tour, a tapas lunch, and a local Malvasía wine tasting. And on Tuesday, the Santa Cruz Carnival Grand Parade turned the capital into a shared stage for the evening.

In between, the stabilizers held. Monday was back to routine: a shorter walk to the gym from our new place, meal planning, a return to the Mercado Municipal and a smaller neighborhood market for groceries, then settling in to work. Gym, park time, one long café sit, and the quiet work blocks that make the days feel like days, not just "travel."

Puerto de la Cruz and Icod de los Vinos: a north-coast day trip

Our Sunday was a two-stop bus trip along Tenerife's north coast, and it turned out to be one of the fullest days we have had here.

Coming into Puerto de la Cruz by bus, you catch glimpses of Teide above the ridgeline. The town itself operates at a different register than the southern resorts. Where those are built for arrivals, Puerto feels built for returns. It has been hosting visitors since the 19th century, when Northern European travelers came for the climate, the botany, and the quiet. That history is still legible in the architecture: balconied houses, shaded squares, and a waterfront scaled for walking rather than shuttles.

We started at the Jardín Botánico, established by royal order in 1788 as an acclimatization garden for exotic plants being shipped from the Americas to the Spanish mainland. Tenerife's subtropical climate made it a natural midpoint. The garden spans 20,000 square meters and holds over 4,000 species, but the specimen that stops you in your tracks is the Ficus macrophylla f. columnaris near the center, a massive evergreen fig tree over 200 years old. Its aerial roots have grown back down to the earth and taken hold, so that what appears to be a grove of trunks is actually one organism. This is the banyan growth habit: horizontal branches send down roots that thicken into new columnar trunks, and the tree slowly builds its own architecture. Standing close, the effect is something like a Gothic nave made of wood. Columns everywhere, and overhead a dense canopy of large, glossy green leaves, dark on top and rust-colored beneath.

From there we walked uphill into the old fishing quarter, with cortados at a sidewalk café between stops, which led us to two smaller discoveries.

The first was the Agatha Christie steps. In February 1927, Christie visited Puerto de la Cruz during a difficult period in her personal life. She stayed at the Gran Hotel Taoro, worked on what would become "The Mysterious Mr Quin," and left enough of a mark that the city later named a street after her, the first city in the world to do so. Today, a staircase near the old town connects the lower beach area to the upper streets, with each step painted in color and inscribed with the title of one of her novels. It is a small thing, but it gives you a sense of how Puerto holds onto its literary and cultural visitors with a kind of civic pride that feels genuine.

The second was Calle de la Verdad, a narrow side street in the historic center where residents have lined both sides of the lane with potted plants. It is not a municipal project, just a neighborhood practice, and it creates a lovely stretch in the city.

We saved the beach and the seawater pools for a return visit and caught the bus onward to Icod de los Vinos.

Icod is a small wine town in the northwest, and the draw is the Drago Milenario: the oldest and largest known specimen of Dracaena draco, the Canary Islands dragon tree. It stands roughly 56 feet tall with a base circumference of about 66 feet and an estimated weight of 165 tons. Its age is disputed; estimates range from 500 to over 1,000 years, though the most commonly cited figure is around 800. It was declared a national monument in 1917 and once appeared on the 1,000-peseta banknote. The trunk contains a 20-foot-high hollow cavity, and during its last flowering in 1995, it produced around 1,800 flowering branches, adding nearly four tons to its weight in a single season.

Seeing it in person is striking. It does not tower over the town so much as preside over it, its broad canopy and dense branching structure giving it the look of something ancient and almost otherworldly, like the kind of tree James Cameron might have used as inspiration for Avatar. We did not enter the park itself but viewed the tree from an elevated terrace near the neighboring church, where it is framed against the sky and you can take in the full scale in context.

We had a tapas lunch at La Parada: pimientos de piquillo rellenos de bacalao (roasted peppers stuffed with cod), tetitas Canarias (small round pies made with gofio and chicken), and flor de alcachofa con huevo frito y jamón ibérico (artichoke flower with fried egg and Iberian ham), finished with a barraquito especial (a layered coffee with condensed milk and Licor 43). Then we wandered into old town around Plaza Andrés de Lorenzo Cáceres, passed the exterior of Iglesia San Marcos (church), and stopped into Malvasía Casa de los Reyes for a small tasting of the local Malvasía wine that gives the town part of its name. Our last stop was Casa del Plátano, a small museum and banana farm dedicated to the Canarian banana, where we learned about the island's banana-growing history, tasted fresh fruit, and sampled a banana liqueur.

It was a full day. Two towns, two buses, and a portrait of the north coast that went well beyond what we expected. We are saving the black-sand beach of Playa Jardín for the return trip.

The Coso Apoteosis: Carnival at full volume

On Tuesday afternoon we took the tram from La Laguna into Santa Cruz for the Coso Apoteosis, the grand finale parade of the Carnival of Santa Cruz de Tenerife.

Some context for anyone unfamiliar: this is not a regional street fair. The Santa Cruz Carnival is widely considered the second largest in the world after Rio de Janeiro. It runs for roughly five weeks, from mid-January through late February, but the final week is when the city truly gives itself over. The 2026 theme is "Ritmos Latinos (Latin Rhythms)," and the Coso Apoteosis (Grand Finale Parade) is the culminating event: dozens of elaborate floats, over two thousand costumed performers, comparsas (dance troupes rooted in Latin American carnival traditions), murga groups performing satirical songs, and the newly crowned Carnival Queen in a costume that can weigh upward of eighty kilograms. The parade route runs along Avenida de Anaga and the Avenida Marítima seafront, and on this night, more than a hundred thousand people line the streets to watch.

We boarded the tram to Santa Cruz, and arrived to find sidewalks packed and the energy high as the crowd anticipated the big parade. Many people were in costume: sequined dresses, feathered headpieces, full-body character outfits, face paint, masks, and groups in matching themes. There was little boundary between spectators and participants. If you were there, you were part of it.

What struck us most was the spirit. Carnival in Santa Cruz is not ironic or detached. It is not a performance viewed from a distance. It is communal and earnest. People danced in the street. Families were out with young children. Older couples watched from folding chairs they had carried down hours earlier. The comparsas moved through with drums and choreography that vibrated in your chest. The floats were enormous, lit from within, and trailed by waves of dancers in coordinated costume. Between the formal groups, the crowd itself became the parade: singing, moving, filling every gap the floats left behind.

The scale is hard to convey without being there. Santa Cruz is not a large city, and on this night it felt like the entire population had emptied into the same few blocks. The sound never stopped. Music layered over music. Percussion from one comparsa overlapped with brass from the next. Confetti drifted through the streetlight. The air smelled like churros, saltwater, and whatever was being poured from bottles tucked into bags.

The parade kept coming. It lasted over three hours. At some point you stop trying to process each float or group and simply let the thing wash over you. That is when Carnival starts to make sense, not as a spectacle to observe, but as a collective decision to be joyful in public, together, without reservation.

For anyone planning to be in Tenerife during Carnival season: go. Take the tram rather than driving. Arrive early and expect to stand or sit on a curb or sidewalk. Bring water. And understand that the Coso is not the only event worth seeing. The Burial of the Sardine, a theatrical mock funeral that closes the festivities, and daytime Carnival events throughout the final week offer an alternate, more walkable version of the celebration. But if you can only choose one event, the Coso Apoteosis is the one.

Teresitas and the island habit of making place

Our visit to Playa de las Teresitas, just north of Santa Cruz, is one of the clearest examples of Tenerife's relationship between raw geography and civic design.

Teresitas feels almost impossibly gentle for the Atlantic. The water is calm and turquoise. The sand is pale gold. Palm trees line the shore. None of it is accidental.

The story begins in the 1950s, when several beaches near Santa Cruz were disappearing. Their sand was being harvested for construction, and the expanding port was claiming more of the shoreline. By 1953, the Santa Cruz City Council began planning an artificial beach at the site. It took eight years to produce a workable design and another four to get it approved by the council and the Spanish ministry. Engineers Pompeyo Alonso and Miguel Pintor drew the full plans.

Construction started in 1968. First came a breakwater, roughly a kilometer long, positioned about 150 meters offshore to calm the Atlantic surf and prevent sand from washing out to sea. Then came the sand itself: approximately 270,000 tons of it, sourced from the El Aaiún region of what was then the Spanish Sahara. It arrived in five million bags aboard the cargo ship Gopegui during the first half of 1973. On June 15 of that year, the beach opened to the public. There were early reports of red ants and scorpions imported along with the sand, but the crowds came anyway. Twenty-five years later, in 1998, another 2,800 tons of Saharan sand had to be shipped in to replace what wind and waves had carried off.

You can read all of that as novelty. But the deeper point is more interesting.

Islands live with constraints. Space is finite. Coastline is precious. So island communities often develop a practical confidence about reshaping public space within fixed limits. Tenerife does not pretend the island is something other than what it is. Teresitas is still framed by the dark volcanic slopes of the Anaga massif. The mountains are close. The Atlantic is still the Atlantic. But within those givens, there is a willingness to engineer daily life at a civic scale.

What we felt at Teresitas was not just tourism. It was ordinary public leisure: families with kids playing along the beach, retirees reading in the shade of the palms, couples and groups of friends lingering for hours because the beach is built to make lingering possible. There is no admission fee. There is no resort gate. The infrastructure serves repeated local use, not a single visit.

That is a kind of civic value. A place made for routine, not just photographs. And it sits neatly beside La Laguna's other kind of "made" feeling: the historic grid that still organizes daily life so well after five centuries. Tenerife keeps returning to the same principle in different forms. Build spaces that hold routine. Then let people fill them.

This week confirmed a pattern we keep noticing in Tenerife: the pause is part of the meal.

A beach day at Teresitas means simple snacks, unhurried café stops, and long stretches where no one is trying to optimize anything. A day trip along the north coast means walking until you are properly hungry, then sitting down and ordering whatever the house does well. Valentine's dinner in an old Canarian house means lingering over dessert and a cortado at a second place because the evening has no curfew. No one is rushing you. No one is clearing your table.

The food here is rarely performative. It is functional, social, and paced. The point is less the plate itself and more the time the plate creates around it. Once you stop trying to eat efficiently, the food starts to feel like it belongs to the day rather than interrupting it.

We are almost three weeks into Tenerife now, and we have stopped watching the clock at meals. We still plan what we eat, but when we eat has loosened. Lunch happens when the walk finds a good table. Dinner starts when the evening feels ready. The island's pace is becoming ours.

Spectacle and routine: Tenerife this week

This week’s photos fall into three small sets that all point to the same contrast.

Public life at full volume: Carnival starts with a simple arrival and ends in motion, costume, and percussion. A city turns itself outward for an afternoon.

North-coast texture: Puerto de la Cruz shows its older, lived-in side. Calle de la Verdad is narrow, shaded, and overgrown in the best way. Nearby, the Jardín Botánico’s columnar ficus holds the opposite kind of energy: slow, quiet, and immense.

Everyday Tenerife: Away from the crowds, the island is ordinary in the best sense. A barraquito in Icod de los Vinos, a working banana plant heavy with fruit, then back to La Laguna for the quieter anchors: the cathedral’s stillness and the clock tower at night.

Taken together, the set is Tenerife in miniature: ordered and alive, planned and improvised.

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Even a "small" move costs more than you think

Moving Airbnbs within the same city sounds like nothing. Same gym. Same routines.

In practice, it still costs energy: packing, resetting a work setup, learning a new street's noise and light patterns, redialing your walking loops, rebuilding the low-friction rhythm you had. It is not dramatic, but it is real. The first two days in a new place are always slightly more scattered.

The upside is equally real. A beautiful street in the historic district changes the feel of things. It simplifies the day. It makes the default routine easier. And over time, ease is the true budget. Money matters, but ease determines whether a place is sustainable or just tolerable.

For anyone considering long stays in one city, that is the practical advice we keep coming back to: design for repeatable days, not peak experiences. The accommodation that makes your Monday morning feel calm is worth more than the one with the better view from the rooftop.

Quick cost note on the move: Our two La Laguna stays together averaged roughly $56 per night across 27 nights. The second apartment, deeper in the historic district and overlapping with Carnival, was notably more per night but worth every euro for its location and dedicated workspace. We took a taxi for the move; when your luggage reflects living abroad rather than vacationing, door-to-door simplicity is worth the fare.

We are staying with the north-coast thread and letting Carnival remain an option rather than an obligation.

Puerto de la Cruz (return): Swim at the seawater pools of Lago Martiánez, the public complex César Manrique designed in the 1970s that turns volcanic rock and Atlantic water into open-air architecture. Walk the black-sand beach of Playa Jardín.

La Orotava (day trip): Start in the historic center and meander uphill through one of Tenerife's best-preserved colonial townscapes. Spend time in the Victoria Gardens. Drop into Casa de los Balcones for the carved-wood galleries and traditional Canarian interiors. Pause in the Hijuela del Botánico. Finish with a long lunch or coffee and a final stroll before the bus back.

Carnival (optional): If the timing and energy align, we may step into one of the daytime street events for another take on the festivities. But we are not chasing it. The Grand Parade was the main event for us, and the rest of Carnival is best when it finds you rather than the other way around.

And in the background, the Tenerife routine remains the anchor: morning gym, a park sit, a long café linger, a historic-street stroll, and work.

The morning after Carnival, La Laguna was quiet again. Shutters opened slowly. Someone swept a doorstep. Café cups appeared on small tables. The rhythm of ordinary routine resumed as if the city had never left it.

That is what stays with us this week. Tenerife holds both registers without strain: the engineered calm of Teresitas, the hundred-thousand-person crowd on the Avenida Marítima, and then, twelve hours later, a man reading a newspaper in a plaza while pigeons circle beneath his chair.

We did not come here for constant spectacle. We came for a place sturdy enough to hold celebration and ordinary days in the same breath. Three weeks in, Tenerife keeps proving it can.

Until next week,
S&S

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