Loro Park - Tenerife Attractions - Canary Islands
This place has the largest collection of parrots in the world. There’s a dolphinarium too. It’s so nice to see dolphins and parrots mixing in peace and harmony at last.
Botanical Gardens - Attractions in Tenerife - Canary Islands
The botanical gardens at Puerto de la Cruz were founded in 1788. That makes many of the trees there very old indeed. They are thus either huge or have grown into remarkably unlikely shapes and are extremely impressive for anyone remotely interested in trees. It’s not as big as Kew Gardens, but no where near as expensive toenter either.
El Teide - Tenerife Attractions - Canary Islands
Standing at over 12,000 feet, El Teide is the highest point in the whole of Spain, not just the Canary Islands. Millions of people each year head for the hills and start the long steep walk through the rich vegetation around the slopes of El Teide. A more volcanic landscape takes over at about 6,000 feet as you continue to climb to the very edge of the crater.
Don’t fancy all that climbing on your tenerife holiday? Very wise. Take the cable car, which goes within 600 feet of the summit. You need a special permit* to go right to the edge of the crater and catch the stench of fumes that the doubting Thomases among you will need to smell to prove to yourselves that this is not a totally dormant volcano; it’s still doing a bit of business down there, somewhere.
*The permit is free and gives you and a limited number of people a two hour window to reach the summit. You’ll need your passports to get the permit and to be let on to the route toward the summit. Not that it’s another country or anything. However, it is really high. So you won’t be catching us up there, view or no view.
Actually some days up El Teide there won’t be a view anyway, but it will still be fantastic. The clouds! That warm trade wind that blows in the direction of Tenerife creates an almost permanent inversion, which means there’s often a layer of cloud at about 3000 feet, which has become known as Tenerife’s ‘cloud sea’ because that’s what it looks like. You’ll be free to explain this to your friends of course and might also want to add that an inversion is a stratum of hydroscopic nuclei (you could just say ‘bits’) trapped by a layer of warm air.