Hyundai i20
5 seats · Automatic · Compact
€33per day, cheapest in this class right now
✶ The capital, 59 minutes from TFS
Santa Cruz.
A city, and the
forest above it.
Most visitors to Tenerife never come here, which is their loss and your convenience. It is a working Spanish city with a port, a carnival and no interest in tourism, and twenty-five minutes behind it is the oldest forest in the archipelago.
✶ Live availability in Santa Cruz
40 cars from €32 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 waterfront, with the auditorium at the endA city that is not a resort
Santa Cruz has a container port, a shopping street, a market, an opera house shaped like a wave, and one of the largest carnivals in the world for a fortnight every February. It does not have a tourist strip, and the people in the bars at nine on a Tuesday live here. If you have spent a week in the south and want to remember you are in Spain, this is the forty-minute drive that does it.
Prices here are the local ones rather than the resort ones, which is worth knowing about lunch and about fuel. Fill up in the city rather than at the last station before the airport.
01
Park underground, walk in
The car parks around the centre and the port are the only reliable option on a weekday and they cost less than the time you would spend circling. Street bays are metered where they are blue and free where they are unmarked white, and the free ones near the middle are taken by eight in the morning.
02
Anaga is the reason to have the car
Twenty-five minutes gets you into laurel forest that predates the Ice Age, on a ridge road with the Atlantic on both sides. It is the single best drive on the island and almost nobody staying in the south makes it, because from there it is an hour and a half each way.
03
The airport is closer than you think
Tenerife North is thirteen minutes and twelve kilometres. Los Rodeos and its quieter desks make far more sense for this end of the island than the fifty-eight-minute run down to the south terminal.
Where the car takes you
The spread from here is unlike anywhere else on the island. Everything in the north-east is close, the mountain is an hour, and the southern resorts are the long haul rather than the near thing.
| Where | Time | Distance |
|---|---|---|
| La Laguna | 12 min | 11 km |
| Tenerife North | 13 min | 12 km |
| Las Teresitas | 15 min | 10 km |
| Candelaria | 16 min | 20 km |
| Taganana (Anaga) | 25 min | 19 km |
| La Orotava | 26 min | 36 km |
| Puerto de la Cruz | 28 min | 37 km |
| Teide, El Portillo | 52 min | 53 km |
| Costa Adeje | 55 min | 79 km |
| Tenerife South | 58 min | 66 km |
| Teide, Parador de Las Cañadas | 1 h 07 | 67 km |
Two of those need a word. Las Teresitas, fifteen minutes along the coast, is the beach the city built for itself: golden sand imported from the Sahara, a breakwater, and almost no visitors from the south. And El Portillo at fifty-two minutes is the northern door to the crater, which is a better drive than the southern one and less crowded at the top.
Which car for a city and a forest
Small, without much argument. City bays are tight, the Anaga roads are narrow, and there is nothing you will do from here that a supermini cannot. If you want the gearbox to take care of itself on the hairpins, an automatic for the mountain roads is a fair upgrade, but book it early because the automatic share of the fleet is small.
Hyundai i10
5 seats · Automatic · Economy
€35per day, cheapest in this class right now
Citroen C3
5 seats · Manual · Compact
€35per day, cheapest in this class right now
SEAT Arona
5 seats · Manual · Crossover
€40per day, cheapest in this class right now
✶ Asked about the city
Parking, Anaga,
and whether to bother.
Is a car useful in the city itself?
Not really, and it would be odd to claim otherwise. The centre is walkable, there is a tram to La Laguna, and city parking is the usual expensive nuisance. The car is for what surrounds the city rather than for the city: Anaga at twenty-five minutes, Las Teresitas at fifteen, La Laguna at twelve, Candelaria at sixteen.
What is the parking situation?
Use the underground car parks. There are several around the centre and the port, and they are the only reliable option on a weekday. Blue-lined street bays are metered with a time limit, unmarked white bays are free, and yellow means no. Finding a free bay near the centre on a working day is close to a myth, and hunting for one costs more time than the car park costs money.
How difficult is the road into Anaga?
It is a proper mountain road: narrow in places, endlessly bendy and frequently inside a cloud. It is also sealed, well surfaced and entirely manageable in a small car at a sensible speed. Taganana is twenty-five minutes on paper and feels like considerably more. What you must not do is turn off onto any of the unsurfaced tracks, which every rental agreement on this island excludes and which will not be covered if it goes wrong.
✶ The north-east corner
Nearby
collections.
✶ A city list, not a resort one
Different stock, different prices.
The capital has fewer cars than the airports and priced for a local market rather than a holiday one. Check the dates rather than assuming, and take the free cancellation while it is there.