Pictures of the Teno Mountains

Teno

Arriving on Tenerife from El Hierro is a sheer culture shock. El Hierro has 9,000 inhabitants and just a few tourists. Five minutes after leaving the ferry terminal of Los Christianos on Tenerife, we had already seen more than 9,000 tourists. Aaargh!!

And the worse was yet to come, we had to pick up a rental car on the airport. Tenerife Sur is quite a big airport and it was absolutely packed with people. Aaargh !! Definitely over 9000 people there, too.

Our casita for a week

Fortunately, we were not staying in one of those enormous hotels of Los Christianos or Playa de las Americas. With our car we drove to the other side of the island, to a village called El Tanque, where we'd rented a little casita on a farm. Pfff, that's a lot better.

El Tanque is a real Canarian village. You don't see many tourists here. When you want to do a lot af walking, El Tanque is a good place for a base camp, especially if you want to explore the Teno Mountains. Our first walk is from a village called Teno Alto to the lighthouse.

The picture on the left is not our rental car.


	We walk in a mountainous area, covered with succulents. The only animals are goats and lizards.

All the way to the lighthouse

When we're halfway (we think), we can see the lighthouse in the distance down below. We're glad we had a lot of training on El Hierro, from this point it's a descent of about 500 meters.

The vegetation is very different from El Hierro

This is NOT a Giant Teno Lizard

Near the lighthouse are also some greenhouses (with windmills). Some tourists collect the rotten tomatoes. We hope they do not plan to eat them. Good quality tomatoes cost next to nothing in the store, so why eat rotten ones ?

Tomatoes

Hey: there are two lighthouses

The locals have a better pastime: fishing. During our lunch we watch them for some time. We conclude they catch nothing, but lose a lot of worms instead. The fish must like that. Another thing we're wondering about are the clothes of the fisherman, he wears his trousers like a Dutch construction worker.


Close to Teno lies Masca, a little village surrounded by steep mountains. Only as late as the 1970's a road suitable for cars was made to Masca. And now it's a place where tourists see how the Canarians used to live, and where they can practice their driving skills.