The Spanish island that feels more like Mars and flights are just £35
GRIPPING my surfboard tightly, I got ready to battle the wave heading my way.
But as the ocean swallowed me up and spat me out for the umpteenth time, I wondered why I didn't just stay in the hotel's adults-only pool.
5
With its year-round waves, Tenerife is a haven for surfers — and I could see that my sister and brother-in-law were doing a lot better than me. They'd even managed to stand up.
It was all worth it, though. When I eventually caught my first wave, a feeling of euphoria rushed over me as the sea whisked me at speed towards the shore.
I was so shocked at my success that I didn't even try to stand up, much to the dismay of my instructor from Ika Ika Surf School.
A two-hour session costs 35 euros and takes place at Playa de las Americas.
Given the variety of sport on offer on the Spanish island, my partner and I couldn't resist trying our hand at riding with Horse Riding Adventure Tenerife.
We trotted around the countryside taking in the views down to the sea.
A one-and-a-half-hour ride costs 35 euros.
We were staying at The Ramada Residences by Wyndham Tenerife Costa Adeje, which was the perfect place to relax.
The resort boasts a huge family pool with hot tub, as well as a peaceful adults-only pool, plus a restaurant and lovely rooftop bar.
Our two-bed apartment featured a huge terrace overlooking the seafront as well as a well-equipped kitchen, which meant we could keep catering costs to a minimum.
Martin Lewis gives travel advice about checking your passport
When we weren't sipping cocktails at the bar, evenings were spent watching the sun set over the sea, while tucking into plates of home-cooked pasta.
For an exceptional sunset, head to Teide National Park, perched on the third- highest volcano in the world.
Travelling by night bus, we set off on a nine-hour excursion which would finish with a stargazing experience that truly dazzled us.
Our coach trundled up and up until we were 3,715 metres above sea level.
We made a couple of stops for people to acclimatise to the altitude, and then, eventually, we broke cloud cover to reveal a deep, blue sky.
Throughout the journey, our guide Jesper recalled tales of the Guanche people who inhabited the island before Europeans arrived.
They lived in caves while rearing animals and farming the volcanic land.
They thought the Teide volcano held up the sky — and when it erupted, they believed it was Guayota, a demon, trying to escape from his hell-like pit.
Guayota needed to be put back into the mouth of the volcano for the blackened sky to return to blue.
The volcano has lain dormant since its last eruption, in 1909, which I was grateful to learn as we reached its peak.
Big Dipper
It was hard to believe this volcanic island used to be even higher than it is, as I stared out across the sea of clouds below me.
But Jesper told us that an older and much taller volcano, Las Canadas, once stood here, but it crumbled in on itself following an eruption.
Before we got to watch the glorious sunset, we passed Roques de Garcia, where you can observe remains of volcanic activity over the years in the form of oddly shaped rock formations.
Walking up the trail surrounded by mighty rocks, I was reminded of just how small I really am.
The views across the plains and lava fields gave the impression that we had left this island in the Canaries and stumbled on to Mars.
We made our way to the northern side of the volcano for the sunset after a three-course meal at Papillon, the highest restaurant in the national park.
Standing at the edge, clutching a mint tea, I watched as the sun began its descent below the clouds.
It seemed to take a while to move down the horizon, but then in what seemed like seconds it dropped out of sight and the temperatures plummeted.
5
5
5
That meant it was time for stargazing.
We all know the nursery rhyme Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, but I had never actually seen the stars properly twinkle until that night.
Guide Jesper asked us where the North Star is.
Not a single one of us gave the right answer, so he pointed it out using a green laser.
He also showed us how to locate the star, also called Polaris, by using the Big Dipper constellation.
We then moved on to the zodiac constellations of Gemini and Taurus, plus Orion.
Despite the chill in the air, the evening felt magical.
Once we finished craning our necks at the sparkling sky, we were led to four telescopes so we could peer at Jupiter and nebulae invisible to the naked eye.
If the rocks had made me feel small before, the stars and planets made me feel even more minuscule.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Times
2 hours ago
- Times
Gareth Southgate brought in the Marines, Thomas Tuchel prefers Pilates
What hits you — well, what gently brushes your cheek — about La Camiral Golf & Wellness is its stillness. When sounds come they are just mild departures from the quiet. A whirr of a golf buggy, the twitter of birds, chirruping insects, a rustle of leaves in the breeze. The music of moneyed relaxation; and from this, England hope to build a soundtrack ending with Sweet Caroline. Generals show themselves through how they treat their troops and it was fascinating being at this resort near Girona, Spain, to see Thomas Tuchel's version of what Gareth Southgate did eight years ago. In June 2017, at the start of his stint as permanent England manager, Southgate used an end-of-season camp as a sort of culture ground zero — a chance to bond the squad and instil the values that would sustain it at the following year's World Cup. Players met in the dressing room at St George's Park and a door sprung open, through which marched representatives from the Royal Marines. The players were told to leave everything, including their phones, and change into fatigues. They went on a bus all the way to the Royal Marines Commando Training Centre near Lympstone in Devon where they spent two days camping on Woodbury Common and tackling gruelling challenges such as the 'sheep dip', which involved crawling through a submerged tunnel of brown, freezing water. Southgate himself plunged in first. It was all very Gareth, the combination of men sharing their feelings under the stars in a context as patriotic as hell. It successfully set the tone for a period peaking at the 2018 World Cup in Russia where a new England, an honest, un-glitzy, vulnerable-but-proud younger squad, recaptured the affection of the English public. The boot camp also helped Southgate choose how his group would be led — by Harry Kane, who the Marines picked out as having the most officer-like quality. REUTERS/ALBERT GEA La Camiral is very Thomas Tuchel. Refined, relaxed and overseas — with a decluttered focus on sport. This is a man who likes a yoga retreat and Japanese tea ceremony. He's more a barefoot than a boot camp guy. But he took England to their retreat in the Pyrenean foothills for the same reason Southgate played soldiers: in a conscious attempt, a year from a World Cup, to establish the relationships and behaviours he thinks necessary for success at a tournament. It's why John Stones, who is rehabilitating an injury is here, and the players going to the Club World Cup were not excused. Being part of the camp was crucial, even if England's match against Andorra on Saturday, in Barcelona, is not. Tuchel is an unusual mix of personal informality and professional intensity, and the camp reflected that. The work part, involving high-tempo training and heat-testing where players ingested digital pills and strained on exercise bikes, in tents, to the point of exhaustion, made headlines. But the downtime stuff has been just as important. On Wednesday, the players were given a recovery day which included gentle exercising in the garden of their hotel with Pilates poles. Then they were free to do as they pleased. Several made use of the resort's world-class golf courses (used for Spanish Opens and PGA Tour events), Cole Palmer went for a bike ride, Jordan Henderson, Jude Bellingham and Trent Alexander-Arnold used the outdoor swimming pool. Eberechi Eze 'spent time just chilling and speaking to family'. There were card games and a PlayStation. Had they been minded to, the players could have used the resort's bird-watching station or fishing pier. EDDIE KEOGH – THE FA/THE FA VIA GETTY IMAGES For a technocrat known for tactical detailing of the highest level, Tuchel is perhaps surprisingly fixated on the human side, and for him the camp has been invaluable for observing his group and furthering his own connections with them — often through casual, individual chats, like he enjoyed with Palmer, each sitting on a ball, briefly shooting the breeze. His ideas around leadership are embodied by Henderson's return to the fold. He sees the 34-year-old midfielder's vocal, outgoing influence as necessary to complement Kane's lead-by-example style and prizes his particular connection with Bellingham. Tuchel is thought to have in mind, as a leadership group for the next year, the quintet of Kane, Henderson, Bellingham, Stones and Bukayo Saka, which adds to the significance of Stones travelling to continue his rehab out here. The week started with a visit to the Spanish Grand Prix. To observers, Palmer seemed pretty nonchalant (or was it nonplussed) about being there but he claimed he enjoyed himself. 'It was good. I went to the one in Abu Dhabi not long ago. But I fell asleep at that one. This one, I was awake,' he said. The motor racing was not only a bonding jaunt but part of an attempt to replicate tournament conditions. The World Cup starts exactly a year from Wednesday (June 11) and trips to finals begin with a send-off, so being part of a big public event was seen as mimicking that in a fashion. Squads have to arrive at tournaments five days before their first game, generally checking into their base camp, preparing there, then moving to the city where they are playing on match day minus one. Accordingly, England spent five days at La Camiral and head to Barcelona on Friday for their meeting with Andorra the following evening. The idea is to have been, as close as possible, in tournament mode. Wednesday's media day was a conscious replication of this. Players were ferried from their hotel to a close-by external location, accompanied by media officers, just like at finals. Similarly, La Camiral — handpicked by the FA's team operations department — was organised like an England base camp hotel with an emphasis on socialising and eating in outdoor areas, and freedom to roam about the site. It is not a dissimilar location to the Spa & GolfResort Weimarer Land in Blankenhain used by England during Euro 2024, and the ForRestMix Club in Repino, England's base at the World Cup in Russia in 2018. Being in the open air and feeling able to move around freely are seen as important by the FA's performance team, in staving off stress and boredom in tournaments. 'A mini-base camp' and 'World Cup lite' were two descriptions of what La Camiral has been about. England stayed at the main hotel on the resort and it was very much Tuchel's vibe. There, ambient piano music plays. On the corridor walls are giant, soothing paintings of woodland. There are Oriental chairs, diffusers, an open-plan atrium filled with natural light, where a red-brick fireplace and artful bookshelves stretch from floor to ceiling over two stories. In the wellness centre you could book for the 'Yoga & Brunch series'. Apparently each session is aligned with the lunar cycle, offering a unique blend of mindful movement, water rituals and nourishing seasonal food. Maybe Tuchel will come back for a holiday. Time will tell. If it all goes wrong, the place will be forgotten. But if England end up parading the World Cup, to their fans singing Sweet Caroline, La Camiral, June 2025, will go down as the starting point, the where and zen a journey began. Andorra v England
Telegraph
3 hours ago
- Telegraph
Is the end of the dreaded airport queue in sight? Not quite
Last week, British passengers arriving at Tenerife South Airport reported 'inhumane' conditions after queueing for more than two hours without access to water or loos. 'We couldn't move our arms, we could barely breathe, and people were sweating. Some parents lifted their children onto their shoulders to stop them from suffocating,' one passenger told local media. It's a frightening image, and one that has become more common at European airports since British air passengers became 'third-country nationals' after Brexit. This effectively gives us the same rights as arrivals from, say, Venezuela, banishing us to the often snail-paced 'All Passports' queue to get a stamp on arrival. When flying home we must also pass through border control to get a second exit stamp before proceeding to the gate. This can lead to scenarios where passengers are kettled at the gates with no access to refreshments if a flight is delayed, and no way to go back to the main terminal area. A new deal Change, it seems, is on the horizon. The Labour party has struck a deal with the EU to allow British passport holders to pass through e-gates, and the introduction of the Entry/Exit System (EES) in October will automate identity checks and remove the need for manual passport stamps. So will these images of British passengers snaking out of arrival halls at European airports soon be a thing of the past? Yes, but it may take a while. When it first rolls out, EES will require British (and all non-EU) travellers to provide fingerprints and facial images when entering or exiting the Schengen Area. This process has been much-delayed, not least because implementing it requires a continent-wide tech overhaul. And as we all know, airport IT systems, often operated by third-party firms and alongside multiple other systems, have a tendency to buckle at inopportune moments. If the new tech doesn't create hold-ups, the data capture process could. Pressing thumbs on sensors and having a photograph taken may sound like a simple process, but how many times have you seen somebody push their passport into the e-gate sensor the wrong way up? Such are the fears of hold-ups that airports are planning 'safety valve' procedures, where the requirement to capture everyone's data will be temporarily waived if a checkpoint gets too busy. On e-gates, I have found this new Labour/EU e-gates 'agreement' to be somewhat smoke and mirrors. The wording in the relevant document says that 'British passengers will be able to use more e-gates in Europe'. But this does not necessarily mean we will be able to use fast-track EU e-gates. Instead, it might be that we remain in the naughty ('All Passports') queue that happens to have an e-gate at the end of it. This will ultimately be up for individual countries and airports to decide. Additional hurdles Perhaps I'm being overly negative. Let's say that the EES roll-out isn't as clunky as feared, and that through some miracle the majority of European airports do kindly allow Britons to use their fast-track e-gates. Surely the airport queues will have simmered down by next summer? Maybe. But we will still face the additional border check when flying home, albeit with biometrics rather than a passport stamp. Even if e-gates are rolled out to British arrivals (as Faro Airport announced this week), we will still need to go to another booth afterwards to get our passports stamped by a human. And hold-ups like those seen in Tenerife are as much to do with poor scheduling as anything else. I checked the arrivals board on Tuesday June 2, and at 10.40am there were scheduled flights from Manchester (Jet2), Liverpool (Jet2), East Midlands (Tui) and Bournemouth (Ryanair). Ten minutes later, flights from Birmingham and Leeds (both Jet2) were scheduled to land, plus another from Paris. That's seven 180-or-so capacity flights touching onto tarmac, one after the other, in the space of ten minutes, at a single-runway, single-terminal airport. Even the sleekest, AI-powered biometric arrivals system would struggle to process all those passengers without the formation of a queue. There are some changes to the airport process that we can feel optimistic about. Soon, we'll be able to take greater quantities of liquids through security at all UK airports. A shake-up of UK flight paths promises to reduce air traffic delays before the end of the decade. And yes, all this new tech will eventually reduce friction at borders. But when you are stuck in a packed arrivals hall with a child on your shoulders and no access to water, you will be praying for progress now – not at some ambiguous point in the future.
Daily Mail
3 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Disabled grandmother says sunbed vigilantes who filmed themselves hiding her family's pool-side towels ruined their holiday
A disabled grandmother has accused sunbed vigilantes of ruining her holiday after they hid her and her family's poolside towels. Wheelchair user Elaine Simpson, 77, from Manchester, was staying with her relatives at the Aquasol Aparthotel near Magaluf when the shocking incident took place. Ms Simpson had been looking forward to spending a day by the poolside and was given permission to reserve sun loungers due to her disability. But, her plans were ruined after a group of friends filmed themselves nicking the towels they had used to save their spots. Ms Simpson explained how her hotel room was on the fifth floor and far away from the pool. And, because she has chronic arthritis and is in a wheelchair, this made it a challenge for her to claim a hotel sunbed before they were all taken. The grandmother raised her concerns with reception and was granted permission to reserve the loungers. But when they arrived in the morning, the towels were gone and they were left without a space again. Ms Simpson told The Sun: 'The only thing that was available apart from that was white plastic chairs, she added. At first the family thought it might have been a life guard who removed the towels in error. But it later transpired they were taken due to an awkward misunderstanding. A group of friends had assumed the towels were put down by tourists attempting to get ahead of the morning rush and were unaware an exception was made for the family. They shared a video on TikTok showing the teenagers laying out the towels in what was perceived as a rebellion against queue jumpers. The innocent family came under fire in the comments section - with viewers criticizing them for the apparent breach of hotel rules. Ms Simpson said: 'It was vile. My grandsons are 13 and 15, they had no right to post any pictures of them. They shared a video on TikTok showing the teenagers laying out the towels in what was perceived as a rebellion against queue jumpers. Pictured: Ms Simpson's grandson's putting down the towels 'They were just trying to look out for me. 'They've not right to do that without checking the facts. 'What somebody saw, and the truth, are completely different.' Ms Simpson said her daughter has contacted the TikToker who posted the original video and that she apologised profusely for the confusion and took the clip down. It comes after British holidaymakers were seen queuing for over an hour in a bid to secure the best poolside spots at a Canary Islands resort. Sunseekers armed with towels, suncream, and flipflops were captured in bizarre footage on May 28 lining up for the pool at the Barceló Lanzarote Active Resort, Las Palmas, Spain. It appears the sunbed wars are now in full swing with hotel guests setting alarms extra early just to form queues to the pool area until staff give them the all clear. The queue of people has become a regular morning routine for holidaymakers at the Spanish hotel according to guests. Isabelle Hanssen, whose balcony overlooks the pool watched on at the pool goers eagerly waited in line. According to the halfpipe skier, the queue is usually made up of Brits with a few Germans also standing in line. Isabelle, from the Netherlands, also revealed that the queues start from as early as 8am despite the pool not opening until 9:30am.
