70 THE OTHER SIDE OF TENERIFE
Sept/Oct 2022 Travel News
THERE’S MORE TO TENERIFE THAN BEACHES!
Andrea McVeigh takes the advice of her tour guide and discovers that there’s more to Tenerife than beaches!
BY ANDREA MCVEIGH
AS WE rounded a tight corner in our tour bus, snaking a vertiginous route 1000 metres above sea level, our tour guide, Jose, declared: “There’s more to Tenerife than beaches!” How right he was. The beach was now a mere smudge of beige in the distance. We were so high up the mountain that the houses in the town below looked no larger than Lego bricks. This was ear-popping territory, where palm trees give way to pine trees.
The aim was to spend a morning tasting high-altitude organic wines at the family- owned Bodegas Ferrera vineyard and winery. It’s located between volcano and forest, on the slope of a black lava-encrusted extinct volcano in the northeast of Tenerife, the largest of Spain’s Canary islands. The route from street to the foot of the Pico Del Valle squeezed through steep, and increasingly narrow, roads and may have been, to quote the eloquent Jose again: “a little spicy.”
But I considered myself lucky. Not only was this the ‘beyond beaches’
jaunt I had been hoping for, but the journey was considerably more comfortable than that taken by the current owner’s grandfather, who set up the vineyard in the 1940s.
Before even a vine could be planted, Papa Ferrera had to clear the land and build terraces. He also had to make the journey from the nearest village by horse to this part of the Arafo mountain. So really, an air- conditioned tour bus was the height of luxury and convenience by comparison.
The family-owned Bodegas Ferrera winery is now in the hands of its third-generation, yet some things never change. Most of the work of the vineyard is still done by hand, because there are no tractors this high up the mountain. The rarefied atmosphere; fresh, fragrant air,
and the fact that the winery uses only organic methods of production, is good for the grapes and the resulting quality of the wine. And it may sound fanciful, but I believed I could really taste the family pride in the finished product, as I sipped on a deliciously crisp ‘rosado seco’ pale pink rosé. This was just one of the wines on offer during the morning tasting at the winery, which lies a half hour drive from Tenerife’s capital, Santa Cruz. You can book a visit online, and you might even bump into owner Carmen Gloria Ferrera talking to her vines. As she says: “I talk to my vineyards; they don’t reply but I know they understand me.” But if 1,000 metres above sea level sounds frankly pedestrian, how about 3,700 metres? A few days into my trip and I was starting to forget that Tenerife had beaches at all. On another guided tour, the bus journey to
Teide National Park – a UNESCO World Heritage Site - took numerous hairpin twists and turns as it wound its way up Mount Teide. So many twists and turns, in fact, that many passengers started to feel positively peaky before we reached the peak. Located in the centre of the island, the sky really is the limit here, as the park – the largest and oldest of four national parks in the Canary Islands - is the perfect place to first see the sun set, before hanging around for a spot of stargazing. When we left our hotel, Hotel Botanico in Puerto de la Cruz, in the early evening, we were in the midst of a warm, but heavy, rainstorm. As our bus climbed the roads, with rain splattering the windows and obscuring the view, we reached such heights that we started to drive through pillows of cloud. And then, in a split second, we went from grey to technicolour, as we broke above
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