High-brow, well-educated, Norwegian families do not travel Tenerife. They do not travel to any of the Canarian Islands. They go to exotic destinations where they can be pioneers, be one with nature and live with the locals. This they cannot do on Tenerife.
But then again, they don’t do that anyway, they just like to give that impression. In essence we Norwegians have one deep urge that is common to most of us when we travel south in winter – that is to escape the crappy climate which descends on our habitat every november sticks around for a good four months.
Tenerife offers this basic commodity, but also much, much more – for better and/or worse.
Me and my companions stayed in one of the “worst” tourist machine areas, a place called Los Cristianos, which like a remarkable number of other current tourist resorts used to be a “sleepy fishing village”. Whoever used to fish in Los Christianos they are mostly gone now and in place of their huts on the beach only monster hotels remain.
This area of Tenerife is home to about 200 000 people out of which about 6 000 were deemed to be locals. The rest, by the look of them, are senior citizens of the United Kingdom complete with walking sticks and stripy pants.
Tourism aside, what fascinated me most about Tenerife was the richness of the natural landscape and the vegetation. Having read how dry and barren the Canries were before I left Norway I half expected to see a monotone desert like landscape with sand and volcanic rock. Tenerife has that too, but in addition the island has rich forrested areas and very, very beautiful mountaneous areas.
I’ll be back.