Tenerife South,
and the island
behind it.

What collection here is actually like

Reina Sofía is a working airport rather than a showpiece. You come off the aircraft, down a corridor, through passport control if you need it, and out into a single arrivals hall with a row of desks along one wall and a set of glass doors at the end. That is the whole building. The car park sits directly opposite those doors across a service road, and between the two is where every hire car on the south of this island changes hands.

Suppliers split into two kinds and your voucher tells you which you have. Some keep a staffed desk inside the hall, which is the version people picture. Others operate from the car park opposite, or from a shuttle stop just outside, and send a representative to meet you at a numbered bay. Neither is better. The car park version usually takes less time in high season, because the desks inside are shared with the walk-up trade and a February afternoon can put twenty people in front of you.

What decides how long you stand there is not the supplier, it is your paperwork. A collection where the deposit was settled at booking, the licence is the physical card and the credit card is in the driver's own name takes a few minutes. A collection missing any one of those three can take an hour or fail outright, and no amount of goodwill at the desk changes it, because the agent is following the rental conditions rather than making a judgement call. That is the whole reason this site shows the deposit and the card rule on every listing before you commit rather than after.

Have these three things in your hand

How far the island actually is

The airport sits on the dry south-east corner, and the first thing that surprises people is how quickly the landscape stops being a resort. The TF-1 starts at the exit and runs west along the coast; within ten minutes you are crossing an arid plain of black grit and wind turbines that looks nothing like the brochure, and eighteen minutes in you reach the windsurfing town, which is the first place worth stopping. The big resorts are half an hour. The far side of the island is closer to two.

These are free-flow driving times, measured by routing rather than remembered, so treat them as the floor. Add a quarter in the Friday evening squeeze around Adeje, and add more than that if you are climbing.

• El Médano, 18 minutes. First exit that matters. Wind, black sand, Montaña Roja at the end of the beach.
• Golf del Sur, 22 minutes. Low-rise and quiet, east of the runway; the golf resorts east of the airport are the closest proper base to the terminal.
• Los Cristianos, 33 minutes. The harbour, and the ferries to La Gomera.
• Playa de las Américas, 30 minutes. The busiest stretch of coast on the island.
• Costa Adeje, 30 minutes. Immediately north of Américas and noticeably calmer.
• Los Gigantes, 50 minutes. Where the coast stops being flat and starts being a wall.
• Teide, about an hour. Up the TF-21 through Vilaflor and onto the crater floor at two thousand metres.
• Puerto de la Cruz, 1 h 21. The north coast, the green half, and a different climate entirely.

That spread is the argument for keeping the car rather than booking a transfer. A transfer solves thirty minutes once each way. A car makes the other seven days of the island reachable, and on a rock this size the difference between having one and not having one is most of what you came to see. If you want the numbers from somewhere other than the airport, the every pick-up point on the island page lists the drive times from each.

Which car, for this end of the island

Nearly everything at the airport is a small manual hatchback, because that is what the island runs on and what the roads suit. It is genuinely the right choice: the TF-1 is a proper motorway, but the roads you drive for pleasure are narrow, and a big car is a liability on the TF-436 rather than a comfort. Where it is worth spending more is the gearbox, since automatics on this island are a small share of the fleet and empty out first in winter.