Tenerife, ES

The Padrón brothers' Michelin-starred dining room in Los Gigantes is the most serious restaurant on the island, with a tasting menu rooted in the Canarian pantry — local fish, papas antiguas, tropical fruits — pushed into precise, inventive territory. The room is calm and unhurried, and the wine list covers the best of Canarian producers alongside a thoughtful Iberian selection.

A 200-year-old house in Puerto de la Cruz shelters one of the north's most trusted kitchens, where locally landed fish, Canarian potatoes, and mojo sauces are handled with care rather than novelty. The vine-covered patio courtyard is the place to eat in good weather. It occupies the ground floor of a beautifully preserved colonial townhouse.

A family winery in El Sauzal with a sprawling terrace restaurant poised over a panoramic stretch of north-coast ocean, serving traditional Canarian dishes alongside wines grown on their own volcanic slopes. The mojo-making workshops and vineyard tours add a useful context before lunch. The combination of exceptional produce, views, and wine makes this one of the island's most complete afternoon experiences.

A compact Arona tasca with a loyal local following for its stuffed courgettes, succulent pork ribs, and papas arrugadas served with proper home-made mojo. Prices are low, portions are unfussy, and the room runs mostly on regulars who have been coming for years. A useful counter-point to the resort dining of the nearby south.

A traditional Canarian restaurant tucked into one of Santa Cruz's most beautifully preserved 19th-century houses, with high ceilings, tiled floors, and a menu that leans heavily on local market produce — papas antiguas, fresh fish, roasted meats with mojo verde. The room is genuinely lovely and the kitchen is consistent rather than fashionable.

A genuine guachinche near the Santa Cruz market district where surplus local wine from a small producer is served alongside a short menu of traditional dishes — rabbit in salmorejo, grilled pork ribs, papas con mojo — in a simple room that feels nothing like a restaurant and everything like someone's living room. The concept is foundational to Tenerife food culture and this is one of the few examples near the capital.

The most interesting non-Canarian restaurant in Santa Cruz, a small Japanese kitchen producing precise sushi and izakaya-style small plates that punch well above the price point. The fish is sourced from the same Atlantic waters that supply the island's best seafood restaurants, and the combination of Canarian ingredients and Japanese technique is handled with restraint.

A contemporary Canarian restaurant in Santa Cruz with a menu that treats the island's market produce — papas antiguas, goat cheese, local fish — with modern technique and minimal fuss. The room is relaxed and the kitchen is one of the more ambitious in the capital without tipping into the formal territory of the Michelin-starred options.

A southern Tenerife asador near Costa Adeje where the emphasis is on simply cooked Canarian food — arroz caldoso, conejo frito, papas con mojo — prepared with genuinely good-quality ingredients in a room that local families fill on Sunday afternoons. None of the slickness of the resort restaurants and all of the flavour.

A smart Santa Cruz tasca with a contemporary take on Canarian home cooking — the conejo en salmorejo is the standout, a rabbit slow-braised in a herby tomato-and-pepper sauce that defines northern island cooking. The room mixes locals and visitors without the forced atmosphere of the tourist-focused tapas bars nearby.

A lively southern tasca decorated with murals and hanging hams where the octopus dishes — both grilled and in a paprika oil — have built a following well beyond the immediate neighbourhood. The menu leans Canarian-Mediterranean with good fish and a solid house wine poured in the traditional tumbler. Noisy, inexpensive, and reliably full.

Named after the ancient dragon tree in the nearby Parque del Drago, this mid-century restaurant in Icod de los Vinos has been feeding the north coast for decades on a menu of local fish, Canarian stews, and properly made mojo both rojo and verde. The terrace faces the old town square and fills with locals from noon on Sundays.

The most celebrated hike on the island descends through a cathedral-like volcanic gorge from the village of Masca to a black-sand cove at the Atlantic, with sheer basalt walls closing in on either side of the trail. The 400-metre descent takes two to three hours one way and the return trip by boat to Los Gigantes makes the full loop manageable. Access is now controlled and limited.

The high spine of the Anaga massif offers the island's most atmospheric ridge walking — through ancient laurisilva cloud forest with views down to both the north and south coasts whenever the mist briefly lifts. The trail between Chinamada and Punta del Hidalgo is the most dramatic section, passing through hamlets that can only be reached on foot.

A free, permit-free loop trail at 2,100 metres through the most photogenic section of the Teide caldera, circling the extraordinary volcanic rock formations of the Roques de García with the snow-capped cone above and a sea of cloud below. The circuit takes around two hours and requires no technical ability, making it the most rewarding easy walk in the national park.

The most remote corner of the Anaga Rural Park accessed from the tiny hamlet of Chamorga, this circular trail drops through a deep ravine to the Atlantic coast and the Faro de Anaga lighthouse, passing the most intact stretch of Canarian laurisilva on the island. The sense of isolation is genuine — phones lose signal and the path is quiet on all but the busiest weekends.

The westernmost point of Tenerife is protected from private vehicle access, making it one of the few corners of the island that remains genuinely quiet. The bus-accessed coastal walk to the lighthouse passes rock pools and lava formations with clear Atlantic water on three sides, and the view back to the Los Gigantes cliffs from the tip is the best on the island.

Santiago Calatrava's wave-shaped concert hall is the most recognisable building in the Canary Islands, housing a 1,616-seat main auditorium and a smaller chamber hall with a year-round programme of classical music, opera, dance, and occasional international pop. The building itself is an experience separate from any event — the white concrete curves are best seen at night when the harbour illuminates them.

The world's largest parrot collection is the original draw of this substantial zoological park in Puerto de la Cruz, which has expanded over decades to include orca shows, sea lions, gorillas, tigers, and a full aquarium. It is a serious zoo rather than a theme park and the conservation work around parrot species is internationally recognised. Worth a full day.

Consistently voted Europe's best water park, a Thai-temple-themed complex in Costa Adeje with rides that range from extreme drop slides to a wave pool generating artificial surf that actual surfers use. The scale is large enough that it takes a full day to cover, and the theming is far more elaborate than most water parks of its type.

Santa Cruz's main covered market was built in 1943 in a Moorish-influenced style around a central patio and remains one of the best food markets in the Canary Islands. The ground floor is all fresh produce — tropical fruits, local cheeses, wrinkled potatoes, mojo pastes — and the upper gallery holds a flower and pet market. Saturday mornings are the most atmospheric time to visit.

The second-largest street carnival in the world after Rio de Janeiro transforms the whole of Santa Cruz for two weeks each February, with open-air concerts on the Recinto Ferial stage drawing international performers and the elaborate costume competitions filling the Recinto for days. The Rúa parade is the formal centerpiece but the street party around it is equally compelling.

The western Teno peninsula protects an old-vine wine culture that has survived in near-isolation, with small producers making Listán Negro and Listán Blanco wines from vines planted on steep volcanic terraces. A self-guided circuit through the hamlets of Erjos, El Palmar, and Buena Vista connects several family bodegas that welcome visitors without appointment and rarely appear in any guide.

Spain's highest peak at 3,715 metres rises from a dramatic volcanic plateau that was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2007. The otherworldly lava fields and pumice plains surrounding the cone make the landscape feel more Martian than European. Sunsets and the star-filled skies above the cloud layer are a separate experience from the peak itself.

Tenerife's former capital and a UNESCO World Heritage city whose 15th-century grid of merchant palaces, convents, and painted colonial facades has been left almost entirely intact. The university presence fills the old centre with independent bookshops, wine bars, and a lived-in energy that the resort towns lack. A short tram ride from Santa Cruz makes it an easy half-day.

A UNESCO Biosphere Reserve covering the ancient volcanic massif at the island's northeastern tip, where laurisilva cloud forest — a relic of the Tertiary period — cloaks the ridge trails and small white hamlets cling to impossibly steep ravines. The park is barely half an hour from Santa Cruz but feels completely removed from the tourist infrastructure of the south.

Sheer basalt walls rising up to 600 metres from the sea form the most dramatic coastal scenery on the island, best experienced from the water rather than the clifftop viewpoints. The bay below supports a permanent population of pilot whales and bottlenose dolphins, making this the best spot on the island for a quiet wildlife boat trip. The small marina town is unpretentious compared to the bigger resorts.

A tiny hamlet of stone houses stacked inside a deeply cleft gorge in the Teno Rural Park, reached by a vertiginous switchback road that most GPS apps handle poorly. The setting is exceptional — a fold of rock that hides the village entirely until you round the last bend — and the trail descending the gorge to the sea is the most coveted hike on the island.

Santa Cruz's flagship museum occupies a handsome colonial hospital building and holds one of the world's most significant collections of Guanche mummies, skulls, and artefacts — the Guanches being the original Berber-descended inhabitants of Tenerife before European conquest. The palaeontological and natural history collections are equally substantial. An honest two hours is needed to do it justice.