Fiat Panda
5 seats · Manual · Economy
€16per day, cheapest in this class right now
✶ West coast, 51 minutes from TFS
Los Gigantes.
Where the coast
becomes a wall.
The cliffs give the town its name and its problem: everything here is on a slope, and everything else is a drive away. Which makes it one of the places on Tenerife where having a car is not an upgrade, it is the difference between seeing the west and looking at it.
✶ Live availability in Los Gigantes
28 cars from €16 a day on these dates
Pick-up and drop-off
Dates
Free cancellation on many carsThe deposit is on the car, before you book itPrices in euros, the figure you see is the figure you pay
Pick-up
Dates
The cliffs, which are six hundred metres at the highestTo Masca24 minTwenty-one kilometres on the TF-436. Allow much longer.
To Costa Adeje27 minBack down the coast on the TF-1.
To the airport51 minForty-four kilometres, and the drive to plan for.
To Garachico44 minNorth through Santiago del Teide and down to the sea.
The town, in one paragraph
Los Gigantes is a small resort stacked down a hillside at the point where the west coast stops being a beach and starts being a cliff. There is a marina at the bottom, a black beach beside it, and apartments up the slope behind. Boats go out to look at the cliffs and, often enough, at whales. It is quieter and older-feeling than the southern strips, and the sun goes behind the cliff earlier than you expect, which people either love or complain about.
What makes it interesting for a driver is position. This is the last town on the west coast before the road turns inland, so it sits at the bottom of the two best drives on the island and at the top of the run back down to the resorts.
The two drives you are here for
The first is Masca. Twenty-one kilometres and twenty-four minutes on paper, and a genuine mountain road in practice: it climbs out of Santiago del Teide, threads along a ridge, and drops into a gorge where a village sits on a spur with terraces below it. It is the single most photographed drive on Tenerife and it deserves the attention. It is also single-track in places and full of coaches by eleven, so leave at eight.
The second is north. Follow the coast through Santiago del Teide and down to Garachico, a town that a lava flow destroyed in 1706 and that rebuilt itself on top of the flow; the rock pools there are set into the lava itself. Forty-four minutes, and the road down the escarpment is the best-engineered mountain road on the island, wide and smooth.
Both of those are the case for booking small. The classes and what they suit is worth a glance, but the short version is that a supermini is the right car for the west of this island and a large saloon is a nuisance on it.
| Where | Time | Distance |
|---|---|---|
| Masca | 24 min | 21 km |
| Costa Adeje | 27 min | 25 km |
| Playa de las Américas | 28 min | 28 km |
| Los Cristianos | 33 min | 31 km |
| Icod de los Vinos | 40 min | 34 km |
| Garachico | 44 min | 37 km |
| Tenerife South | 51 min | 44 km |
| Teide, Parador de Las Cañadas | 54 min | 47 km |
| Puerto de la Cruz | 1 h 04 | 59 km |
| Santa Cruz | 1 h 15 | 102 km |
The airport run, planned properly
Fifty-one minutes and forty-four kilometres in this direction; fifty minutes and forty-five in the other. Both are measured and both are right, because the routes are not identical in reverse. Either way, this is the longest airport transfer of any pick-up point on the south and west of the island, and it is the one where an early flight actually matters. Leave ninety minutes for it and take the TF-1 rather than anything scenic.
If your flight home is at an awkward hour, dropping the car at the terminal instead of back here is worth pricing. A one-way between the two airports explains how the fee is handled, which is inside the quoted price rather than added at the desk.
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✶ Asked about the west
Three roads,
three answers.
Is the road to Masca as bad as people say?
It is narrow, it has blind bends, it uses passing places, and it takes considerably longer than twenty-one kilometres suggests. It is also sealed tarmac the whole way and an ordinary small car handles it without any difficulty at all. What it does not tolerate is speed or a wide vehicle. Go early, take the smallest car you booked, and let anything behind you past rather than being hurried.
Why is Santa Cruz an hour and a quarter when it looks close?
Because there is no road across the middle at this latitude. Everything between here and the capital runs either south around the coast or north through Icod, and both are the long way round. The map distance and the tarmac distance are different quantities on this island, and this is the clearest example of it.
Is parking difficult in the town?
The town is built into a slope, so the streets are steep and the bays are short. Blue lines are metered, unmarked white bays are free, yellow means no. A small car is a genuine advantage here rather than a preference, and you will be doing hill starts several times a day whether you planned to or not.
✶ The far end of the coast
Few cars, long airport run.
Stock this far west is limited and the drive back to the terminal is the longest on this side of the island. Book early, and give the return leg ninety minutes rather than the fifty the map promises.