After six days in Los Cristianos with daily scuba diving, we went to explore other interesting places in Tenerife. This photo shows huge basalt cliffs called Acantilados de Los Gigantes (Cliffs of the Giants) and the black beach Playa de los Guíos in a resort town of Los Gigantes. These rocks are part of the Teno mountain range and are considered the western slope of the Teide volcano. Earlier, when the Guanache tribes lived in the Canary Islands, they called these rocks "Devil's Wall".
Houses are located almost at the very edge of the coast. I can imagine how wonderful it is to live every day in a house with such views, to see rocks and waves under the windows, to hear the sound of the ocean.
There are no such large beaches as in Los Cristianos, but the waves are bigger, more powerful. We stayed at this place, probably for an hour. It seems that I can look at such a spectacle endlessly. And if there were no specific plans to go further, then we would have stayed there longer — we climbed the top of those rocks so that splashes periodically flew. A mesmerizing sight and feeling.
If you go by boat along the Devil's Wall, you can get to the Masca beach, and along the gorge of the same name climb to the village of Masca, where you can eat cactus ice cream, drink cactus juice and eat a cake with cactus jam. It is easier, of course, to do this route the other way around: first come to the village, then go down the gorge to the beach and then go by boat to Los Gigantes. I really want to go this route too.
The Masca Gorge is one of the most popular attractions on the island, but in December 2019 for more than a year it has been closed to the public for security reasons. They were going to open it in the summer of 2020, but I don’t know whether it was eventually opened or not. In any case, then we just had to go to the village by car, along a rather narrow and winding serpentine.
On the way there are many picturescue viewpoints. But it is not always possible to stop there — they are too small, in some places only 2-3 cars can park, and there are many tourists who want to stop for at least a few minutes. Although, maybe we were just so unlucky, as we were in these places just before Christmas.
On the way to the Natural Park of Teno, we passed a wonderful natural monument the Montaña del Palmar, it is a mountain, located in a valley full of terraced fields. In the distance, the cone of the Teide volcano is visible.
A very unusual view of the mountain. There was once a quarry here, and over-mining has led to the giant holes in the slopes. And cacti grow on the terraces.
There are a lot of fields, including vineyards. The Canary Islands have their own wine brands, but the wineries have been closed due to the celebration of Catholic Christmas, so we tasted only those wines that we bought in usual shops. Not bad, but oddly more expensive than New Zealand, Australian and Spanish mainland wines. Perhaps because of the small number of vineyards and exclusivity?
Having run over the mountains, we went down again to the ocean. It's good that the island is small, it's not long to get to the ocean from anywhere) Municipality of San Juan de la Rambla. A small picturesque town with a population of about five thousand people.
Morning photo from the platform in front of the hotel. Dawn delighted me with colors.
Playa de los Roques beach is rocky with strong waves, but the view is wonderful.
The main attraction of the town is Charco De La Laja, a natural lava pool to which a winding staircase leads from a small observation deck at the end of the street.
In a storm, it would probably not be comfortable to swim here — strong waves can hit the swimmers on the stones. We hoped to try the pleasure of swimming in the ocean water in this natural lava pool thicket, but it turned out that it was closed for swimming. Why? It is unclear. Nobody guarded the staircase, of course, it was simply symbolically tied with a red ribbon in a couple of places, but who knows why it was forbidden. Maybe just in that season the waves were too strong? ...
And this is a view of the municipality of Adeje from the beginning of the Barranco del Infierno (Gorge of Hell). To get to the gorge, you need to book your visit in advance, buy tickets and bring comfortable trekking shoes and water with you. At the entrance, each visitor is given a helmet — it is forbidden to stop in a part of the canyon, as there is a high probability of rockfall. I didn't really want to put it on, my head heats up under it, but what could I do, it's strict with safety.
The gorge was pretty, but we arrived early in the morning so that it would not be so hot to walk along it, and since the whole canyon was in the shade, I mainly shot birds instead of landscapes)
For example, these are the Barbary partridge. They were walking along the trail without helmets, intruders!
At the end of the trail, the reward will be a waterfall. In general, it's rather complicated with water in Tenerife (except for the ocean one) — there are practically no rivers, streams and waterfalls, only small seasonal flows from the mountains when the snow melts. Basically, fresh water condenses from the atmosphere in caves in the mountains and flows down pipes into reservoirs. But this is literally a drop in the ocean comparing to the usual water level in nature for most of Russia or Europe. Apparently, therefore, the administration of the gorge, realizing that the image of the waterfall may be slightly different for unaccustomed people, somewhere at the beginning of the gorge even wrote that we should not expect a powerful roaring stream of water.
We saw really not big waterfall, but it was pretty, and a walk was nice, so we and did not regret visiting the gorge.
To be continued...
Previous parts:
Tenerife: Part 1
Tenerife: Part 2
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