Food and Drink on Tenerife – You Can Tell a Place by its Supermarket

Here’s a general rule of thumb, if you want to get an idea of what a place is like and what sort of people
live thereabouts visit the local supermarket. It’s essentially important when you’re looking at locations as potential places to move to whether for good, or even just for a couple of months.

When I lived in Levenshulme near Manchester, the local Asda was full of the most exciting and diverse range of food products aimed at satisfying the culinary needs of the different communities living in the area. I could even buy the Jamaican speciality ackee. It was heaven for food lovers .

A few miles further down the road in Stockport, the range of products wasn’t quite as extensive and tended to be generally quite unadventurous, but perfectly adequate for most of the people who shopped there. A further few miles along the A9 in Hazel Grove, Sainsbury’s opened a flagship store aimed at what they saw was a middle class shopper from the ‘posher’ end of Stockport and surrounding area. Whilst the choice wasn’t quite as worldwide as Levenshulme, it did have sun dried tomatoes and the likes – quite adventurous at the time.

On Tenerife it’s no different. A supermarket in Los Gigantes will stock very different items from a supermarket in La Laguna for example. The supermarkets in the tourist resorts are different from the supermarkets which cater for mainly Canarian residents.

I’m a self confessed foodie; I love all types of food and will try virtually anything and subsequently it's important to me that I have access to a wide variety of international products as well as local foods.

In this respect, living in the La Orotava Valley turned out to be perfect; more by luck than by good planning I have to say. The Al Campo supermarket in La Villa isn’t perfect by any means, but there are very few ingredients which I was able to get hold of in the UK (and I mean ingredients, not products which is a completely different thing) that I can’t pick up there.

Products are mostly aimed at the valley’s Canarian residents which means that there are hardly any TV dinners or pre packed meals (an indicator that Canarios still prepare meals from scratch). There are sheets of salted fish, walls of hams, pigs ears, sheep ears, whole skinned rabbits and piglets, horse meat, cow’s tongues and strange things which cling to rocks which I haven’t figured out what to do with yet.

However, there’s also a decent mix of other nationalities in the valley from a variety of countries including Europe, South America and Africa. So the supermarket also has German sausages; cheddar, brie & feta cheese; Mexican, Indian & North African products like ‘ras el hanout’; an incredible spice which adds the most divine flavours to anything it’s sprinkled into.

What it means is that I can still prepare all the recipes I used to before I moved here, as well as adding a few more, locally inspired dishes.

But if you don’t check out what the local supermarket stocks, or even where it is, you could end up like my friend who lives in a remote valley on La Gomera. It’s a beautifully stunning location, but the nearest shop is a thirty to forty minute drive away and it doesn’t stock much anyway. The island’s main supermarket in San Sebastian is only marginally better.

When she stays with us and we go to the supermarket, she always ends up resting her head on one of our shoulders, almost crying at the treasures she sees filling the aisles in front of her eyes - bless her.

Another Month Going Native in Tenerife – Bikers, Neo Hippies, Marauding Clowns and Surreal Killer Whales.

It doesn’t feel as though there was as much going on this month. The fiestas have slowed to a bit of standstill (on Tenerife that means there are only a handful of them as opposed to one every other day) and we’ve moved into the winter season – the temperature in town yesterday was around 33 degrees Celsius.

The Germans and British are returning to Puerto de la Cruz (I spotted a woman sunbathing in her bra on the harbour beach – a sure sign that the British winter visitors are back) and the vibrancy of the summer months is slowing down to a more sedate pace (until Carnaval kicks in of course).

However, that’s not to say that there’s been nothing happening.

Eco Warriors
We started the month at a lovely little Eco Fest in Los Silos, still one of Tenerife’s secret spots. The bohemians were out in force and unless you were sporting dreadlocks, wearing Arabian pants, or had an impossibly cute mongrel in tow the chances were that you’d be feeling a wee bit dull amongst the hordes of cool looking dudes. Unfortunately the music was crap, courtesy of some incompetent sound engineers.

Hell’s Angels in Garachico
The same night saw leather clad bikers converge on the sleepy picturesque town of Garachico. It was on the same stretch of road as the Eco Fest so we had a two-fest night out. Some of the people were as eye catching as the neo hippies but for different reasons – note: leather mini skirt, fishnets and thigh length boots is a difficult look to pull off when you’re in your 60s. Good music at this one though.

Colourful Killers and Clowns with Frowns
Santa Cruz has featured quite a lot in our travels this month and although we got nowhere with a fashion feature we had planned, we did get to see some surreal killer whales and finally manage a couple of half decent profile photos where we don’t sport expressions like Myra Hindley and Ian Brady. 

There’s always something interesting going on in the capital and although I wasn’t overly excited by the idea of a clown street festival (bloody scary things if you ask me) it turned out be quite good fun. Although some of the laughs were unintentional. An Australian clown, Oskar, whose Spanish was limited, ran into serious problems during his ‘sound check’. Every time he started playing a little guitar to check the sound levels a lot of the audience began clapping along. Telling them 'Sssshh, this is a sound check’ in English got him nowhere and every time he strummed, they clapped making his sound check virtually impossible. The expression on his face wasn’t particularly that of a friendly clown – it made me laugh, but I did feel for him.

Three Walks in One Day
A lot of people have been asking about walking on Tenerife, so we figured that we’d better crack on with writing some more ‘Island Walks’ and set ourselves the target of three walks in one day around the Adeje/Arona areas.  It was hard going, but we managed it. I’m sure that when we limped into the plaza in San Miguel, tired and dusty looking and then performed a series of leg stretches which really don’t help with any street cred, but do cut down on potential aches and pains (although from the noises Andy made every time she moved the following day, I thought she’d learned Mandarin during the night), the locals in their nice clothes turning up for mass must have thought we were just a pair of odd extranjeros.

Much more fun was a trip around Las Arenas Negras with our friends Nikki, Richard and Baz of Tenerife Dogs fame, especially when the route signposts deserted us and paths became virtually non existent. Still, a beer and an almond cake at the end of the walk in the sunshine just rounded off a very nice day and a great walk.

The end of the period was taking up by working on the final preparations for Tenerife Magazine, the island’s first online English language magazine, which was launched at the end of last week.

We’re working with some really excellent and talented people and are very excited about the project. The magazine also has a great competition to win a week at Sands Beach in Lanzarote which is open to anyone who becomes a fan on Facebook, so sign up and get your name in for the draw.

I’m sure I’ve missed a few things out, like our running battle with the local supermarket over ‘creative pricing’ and the beautiful sunsets and monster waves which coincide with the change of seasons and some outrageous political shenanigans.

All in all, it was just your average month on Tenerife.

Why Would Anyone Have Wanted to Live in the South of Tenerife?

It’s a question which crossed my mind as we sat eating lunch on an abandoned terrace in a little valley tucked away in the hills above Playa de las Américas and Costa Adeje. It was miles from any decent sized town, the earth was dry and hard and unwelcoming and yet there were empty agricultural terraces lining every slope.

There weren’t many people who made their home in the south of Tenerife before tourism brought the masses and the promise of sunshine and year round warmth made it a desirable place to live, but I wondered what sort of people they were and why they chose to settle in a place which must have been incredibly difficult to farm.

A girl in the Los Cristianos tourist office once told me that when she was young her parents used to bring her to Los Cristianos, but at that time there was hardly anything there. A lot of the inhabitants were fishermen living in caves. She said most of the people there were very poor. It makes sense when you think about it.

Until tourism changed the south coast all the well to do and educated people lived north of Güímar. The north coast is peppered with the most beautiful and grand haciendas, but south of Güímar you’re hard pressed to find anything which comes close to these historic buildings. The best lands (i.e. those in the north) were dished out to the noblemen, therefore the settlers who ended up with plots in the arid lands in the south must have been the poorest of the poor, unable to afford decent land in the more agriculturally friendly areas.

As for the fellow who occupied the remote abandoned valley, he really must have been at the bottom of the ladder, or maybe he was an outlaw, or even a pirate. It’s documented that slave traders operated out of the area and that pirates were in cahoots with some of the wealthier families hereabouts, so maybe he tended his farm some of the time and headed off with other miscreants to Africa to capture slaves the rest of the time. Maybe my imagination was running away with me.

I took a bite out of my bocadillo and gazed over the line of fancy new hotels in upmarket Costa Adeje which had replaced the cave dwelling fishermen, peasant farmers and outlaws and smiled.

How times change. It’s a funny old world.

Passing Time

I was just thinking about how long we’d lived on Tenerife when it suddenly struck me that it must be very close to our sixth anniversary of moving here. Sure enough, checking the calendar, it was six years ago today that Jack and I arrived on the island to start our new life.

It’s funny to think back to our hopes, fears and expectations when we first got here. Two years ago when this anniversary came around, I took stock of what we’d achieved versus our expectations and looking back on that blog, I think it might be time to do a quick progress report.

1.    Speaking Spanish. I remember saying to Jack as we came into land that we’d probably have to give ourselves 6 months to ‘get used to the language’ before deciding how we were going to make a living here. Six years later I still can’t get over the mind-numbing stupidity and arrogance of that remark. Okay, the current season of ‘Cuétame Cómo Pasó’ is easier to understand than it’s ever been before but it’s still a bit like having an online Spanish lesson and not at all the relaxing experience of watching, say Coronation Street.
2.    Earn a living. I like Jack’s descriptor of this one: “we now earn a livi’ which is almost a living.” Luckily, our taste in cava is still cheap so we can pop a bottle tonight to mark the occasion.
3.    Learn Salsa – I’m afraid a livi’ doesn’t run to salsa lessons.
4.    Earn a living from writing – see 2. above.
5.    Be happy. Yay! Still putting a big, fat tick in that box…most of the time anyway (see 2. above)

So here’s to another year of near perpetual sunshine, forgetting how to walk in high heels, never having to paint a radiator and Going Native in Tenerife…salut!

Parking in Tenerife’s Towns – It Helps to be in the Know.

First of all I’d like to thank ‘scotrock’ whose comments in the last blog reminded me that trying to find parking in any big town or city can be a real nightmare. This applies pretty much anywhere of course and finding parking in Tenerife’s towns is no exception.

It’s something you tend to erase from your memory when you’ve lived here for a while (isn’t that the brain’s way of dealing with bad experiences), but initially for us Puerto de la Cruz, La Orotava, Santa Cruz, La Laguna and many, many other places on Tenerife all made cracking the Da Vinci Code seem like child’s play compared with finding a place to park.

Of course once you get to know places you discover that there are car parks all over, but this falls into that old Tenerife approach to imparting helpful information to others: ‘you have to already know where the car parks are to know where the car parks are.’ The same thinking applies to fiestas – ‘you have to know what times fiesta events take place to know what time they actually take place.’

If that doesn’t make any sense, spend some time here and it soon will.

Anyway, here’s a brief guide to the big 4 where parking doesn’t have to be a high blood pressure inducing nightmare…

Puerto de la Cruz
Puerto has one of the biggest free car parks on Tenerife and it’s right in the centre of town beside the harbour. The hard bit comes in trying to find it for the first time.

A lot of maps show the area that is actually the car park as the ‘Parque Maritimo’ and sometimes, a bit more accurately, as ‘futuro Parque Maritimo’.
The truth is that it’s been the ‘futuro parque maritimo’ for 30 years, but is, and will be for quite a while longer, the main town car park.

It’s just one of Tenerife’s quaint, or frustrating depending on your viewpoint, little foibles.  The main access is beside the town’s football pitch (accessed from the coastal road at Playa Jardín).

La Orotava
Apart from fiesta times, it’s usually easy to park on the residential streets below the Iglesia de la Concepción. However, you have to know your way around to get to them from the motorway. It’s easier for visitors to follow the TF21 (road to Mount Teide) and head right into the San Agustín car park (well signposted) in the centre of town. It’s right on the edge of the old town, so perfect for exploring Tenerife’s most noble town.

Santa Cruz
God bless the new bus station car park. This has to be the best car park in the world. It’s bright, cheap, modern and I can’t think of anything else on Tenerife which has been so well thought out. A lighting system makes finding spaces easy even on the busiest of days (green light means a free space). it’s a 10 minute walk to the centre of town – a fact which deters a lot of Tinerfeños from parking there, so it’s rarely too busy. It’s also easy to get to from the motorway – straight down Avenida Tres de Mayo. It makes driving into the city a joy.


La Laguna
Oh, well. What can you say about La Laguna? It’s a test of nerve for sure. The old town’s narrow streets are particularly testing with drivers unsure of who’s got right of way. Only this week I watched a small white van plough into the side of a car at a junction (nobody was hurt). Amusingly, even the mini version of La Laguna at Pueblo Chico has minor car accidents on its model streets. There are car parks, but negotiating the maze of streets to find them is the big problem.

I found the perfect solution – a free car park on the edge of the old town reached from the ring road which skirts La Laguna on the way to Tegueste. It was perfect. Even on fiesta days I managed to park there easily… until the authorities designated it as the space for a new health centre. However, it was right beside the market which does have a large underground car park, so it’s still a good spot for parking without having to drive through the city.

These are only a brief snapshot, but hopefully they might help some poor souls avoid parking hell on Tenerife.

Did You Hear the One About the Canario, the Swallow and the First Time Visitors to Tenerife?

I’m nosey, I confess it. I listen in to other people’s conversations all the time. I don’t do it deliberately, but clearly I’ve got one of those built in triggers which kicks in when it hears certain key words.

Last night the words which set it off were ‘giant moth’.

The conversation was taking place between a Canarian barman, a newly arrived pair of British swallows (people who spend the winter in Tenerife and fly back to their home country for summer) and a sweet young couple who were visiting the island for the first time. They'd found themselves staying way off the tourist trail in Isla Baja and had been travelling into Puerto de la Cruz in the evening for a bit of nightlife.

I’d already warmed to the young couple earlier as they had a lovely fresh enthusiasm for learning about Tenerife and had spent a lot of time asking the barman how to say certain things in Spanish. He duly obliged, only coming unstuck when they asked him to translate ‘cider and black’ into Spanish.

Anyway, I’d stopped listening until I heard the words ‘giant moth’. The young couple had moved on from asking the barman how to ask for a ‘roll’ or ‘sea bass’ in Spanish and had started telling a couple of swallows next to them about their exploits.

Seemingly they’d been out and about quite a lot, using only public transport, and that day had visited Icod de los Vinos to see the famous ‘Millenium Drago Tree’. The lad was a bit disappointed that it wasn’t actually shaped like a dragon, but what had impressed them both was a visit to the ‘Mariposario’ butterfly park next to the Drago Tree – especially a little or rather, more accurately, frighteningly mutant sized, fellow called ‘Atticus Atlas’.

The Mariposario is a fascinating place to visit and the young couple were clearly blown away by the experience, if a little freaked by encountering a ‘butterfly’ the size of a blackbird.  However, it was the conversation which followed which really interested me. As they enthused about the butterfly park, they asked the swallows if they’d been – they hadn’t. They asked them if they’d been to see the Drago tree – again they hadn’t. Despite having visited the island yearly since before the young couple they were talking to were born, they had never made the 20 minute journey down the coast to see one of Tenerife’s icons. As the young couple rattled off more places, the answers came back, ‘no, not been there’, ‘no, haven’t actually seen that.’

It’s not the first time I’ve heard this type of conversation between ‘interested’ new visitors and people who have visited year after year for the last couple of decades.

I sometimes wonder if some seasoned visitors can become complacent and forget that they haven’t actually seen all there is to see on Tenerife.

The young couple engaged the barmen in the conversation and asked him if he’d seen the ‘super moth.’

“Why would I pay to see a butterfly?” He shrugged his shoulders dismissing the world’s largest butterfly just like that.

It seems it’s not just veteran visitors who can become complacent about getting out and about to discover the best of this island.

A Month Going Native in Tenerife – Fiestas, Cool Bars, Golden Beaches and Transvestites

Every so often, I like to have a look back at what went on and the things we saw, or did over the previous few weeks. We never manage to get to half of the places, concerts, events or fiestas that we would like to go to that take place on Tenerife on a continual basis – there are just too many. But without exception, there’s always something new to us, something quirky, or something just plain mind blowing in the pot and on too many occasions, the best of them take place outside of many visitors’ radar. Here’s a quick summary of the last few weeks.

The Virgen de Candelaria
The fiesta of the year in Candelaria attracted tens of thousands of pilgrims who walked from all over the island to honour the Canary Island’s patron saint. We cheated and drove. Candelaria looked as good as we’d ever seen it and the basilica looked magnificent as the people of the town re-enacted the Guanche discovering the virgin on the beach in Laurel and Hardy fashion.

Glad to be Gay
Puerto’s gay week was a lot of fun and the gay parade which rounded off the week was like watching a remake of Priscilla, Queen of the desert. The ‘Beauty Queens’ gave their female counterparts a run for the money in the glamour stakes and no doubt had some onlookers who didn’t know what was going on wondering ‘are they, or aren’t they?’

Tenerife’s Most Decadent Bar?
Incredibly our first night time visit to Abaco cocktail bar, what must be one of the island’s most unique bars. Live light jazz in a colonial mansion where the tasteful arrangements of exotic fruits litter the floor.

Getting to the Heart of the Matter in Tejina
It’s been a couple of years since we last saw the people of Tejina, in the garden of Tenerife in the north of the island, bare their hearts in one of the island’s sweetest fiestas. And what stunning hearts they were, made from elaborate designs of fruit and pastries.

Undiscovered Country – The Eastern Anagas
We tested out a potential new route for our Real Tenerife Walks series and found spectacular views, a quirky early warning station from the 2nd World War and also that trying to retrieve a hat blown off by the wind is a sure way to end up with a leg full of cactus spines.

Tenerife’s Best Beach
There’s a lot of work planned for what we think is Tenerife’s most stunning beach, Las Teresitas. Thankfully none of it has so far ruined its exotic appearance – of course we had to spend some time lying on it to check this out… it’s a hard job and all that.

The White Fiesta

Puerto’s last dance fiesta of the summer involved everyone wearing white. It turned out we were the oldest revellers there by decades… apart from the Bavarians who had wandered along from the Bavarian Beer Festival in their lederhosen to add a surreal element to the scene.

Some young Tinerfeño lads, one of whom insisted that he was Jim Carrey’s distant cousin through his mother’s side, told me confidently that Manchester United would win the Champion’s League this season, but Tenerife would win it next season, presumably after winning La Liga. Bless them.

Country Lanes and Fresh Trout
And the four weeks were rounded off by a gentle stroll through La Orotava’s pine forests and Aguamansa’s flower lined country lanes followed by a lunch of fresh trout (2 for €4.80) in the forestry worker’s favourite haunt at La Caldera.

One of the wonderful things about this island is that there is no such thing as a typical month in Tenerife… if you’re willing to make the effort that is.