Two walks in wild Tenerife

Go to Tenerife to see Mt Teide!  At 3718 metres above sea level El Teide is Tenerife's magnificent oceanic basalt volcanic peak with a history of recent activity, notably the destruction of a town in the early 1700s. The last eruption was in 1909. 

Only its uppermost part lies above sea level. If we consider its real height above sea floor its the third biggest volcano in the world, after Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea on Hawaii. Its easy and inexpensive to get to, on a charter flight especially cheap at the last minute, beautifully exposed, and offers some great excursions. Two trips are described here: the walk down from the summit cable car station; and a short circuit in the vast caldera.

Staying on Tenerife your best choice is to rent an apartment in the south near the airport, around Los Christianos for example, or else to go to Los Gigantes. The north side of the island can be rainy, the south is the best bet: its much sunnier and there is far more accommodation, its cheaper and car rental is very easy (try to get one with all four cylinders firing, as you have to drive up the hill), and if your flight gets there at night its the place to stay. Its worth spending a week on Tenerife, remember that it snows in the winter in the caldera, be prepared with cold weather clothing if you go in the winter months. The top is usually cloud-free but can be freezing. In the summer you are going to need water: at any time, good boots are absolutely essential, the volcanic terrain is exceptionally rough on the peak.

Three books are well worth having before you go:

The Geologists' Association Guide No 49, by Gill et al, 1994.

Landscapes of Tenerife, by Noel Rochford, Sunflower books, 1997 is a pocket book with good maps and describes many walks in Tenerife, with details of public transport, permit information for the summit, etc. (Read about the walk down the Barranco del Infierno, in here: its a deep ravine section in the older volcanics, spectacular outcrops).

Los Volcanes de Las Islas Canarias, by Vicente Arana and Juan Carracedo, Editorial Rueda, 1978, excellent introduction with many fine photos, one of the best general books on volcanoes we know. The text is mixed Spanish and English.

So we presume you're ready to go!

Trip 1. The Caldera walk: Roques de Garcia

Someone said this must be pretty close to walking on the Moon. The landscape is just amazing. 

This 5 km walk starts at the Parador visitor centre, which is 6 km south of the peak. Its about a 2 hour drive from the south coast via Arona and Vilaflor, climbing the winding road up the flank of the volcano through beautiful pine forests, and as you enter the caldera the sudden view of El Teide is stunning, its rugged southern slopes are covered by recent leveed lava flows including black obsidian.  The whole floor of the caldera and the peak is in the National Park. 

Now see photo 1, taken from high on Mt Teide, which is a view of the caldera floor and the Roques are the line of pinnacles in the centre of the picture. 

Looking south, the line of the Roques is clear, recent lavas flood against the sides of the pinnacles and flow between them. Note the south wall of the caldera. The Canadas caldera is a colossal collapse depression, some 15 km in diameter, the walls are 500 metres high and modified by huge slides. 

Leave your car (or get off the bus) at the Parador, which is the restaurant/museum at the very left of the photo, you can buy tea, etc, posters and maps, and there is an interesting exhibit here. Walk west to the Roques de Garcia, 5 minutes away, and visit the Mirador (tower) to look west over the Canada Llano de Ucanca, which is a fluvial basin. You'll see a shattered spire of phonolite rock called the Cathedral (photo 2), surrounded by ash and gravel of the Canada, our walk will loop round later past the foot of this fantastic crag. The phonolites probably belonged to a  shallow  magma chamber feeding lavas to the floor of the caldera: perhaps it fed a lava lake at some time.

Follow a well marked track northwards, keeping the line of outcrop on your left. The Roques are extraordinary and include sequences of breccia, some of these rocks are probably deposits of lahars. Look at the amazing pinnacles (photos 3, 4). They seem to separate two compartments of the caldera floor, with a big difference in elevation between the two structural units. Perhaps there were two magma chambers emptying at different times? There are also some volcanic necks with horizontal phonolite columns, perhaps leak points along the cross-caldera fault. 

The Roques offer opportunities for real photographers to catch incredible shapes. I've over-exposed my shots here, so you can see the structures: at least, that's my excuse for the technical quality!

At the end of the Roques you'll walk onto a marvellous pahoehoe complex with lava tubes, its the vast, wide flow we are looking down in photo 1. Go carefully straight up the middle of this huge El Teide phonolite, the best caves you'll find are about an hour from the start of the walk. The views of El Teide are magnificent. Compare this relatively smooth, ropy lava with the chaos of the block lavas nearby: they are impossible terrain to cross.

Head off to the left and soon you will see an extraordinary lava "waterfall" (photo 5) which you can walk down with care, into the gravel-floored Canada. 

Look north at El Teide (photo 6). The gravels of the Canada floor are full of bombs fired from the vent of El Teide.  

Follow the track south again past the huge spire and you'll see its made of columnar lava, deeply corroded in places by super-hot gas (photo 7).

Climb back to the start, meeting the road and walk east past the hydrothermally deeply-altered blue rocks of Los Azulejos. These are on the caldera ring fault system. If you want to see more intrusions into the ring faults, go to Piedras Amarillas.

Trip 2. The walk down El Teide

El Teide and its neighbour Pico Viejo are post-caldera stratocones of lavas and pyroclasts, made of basalt, trachyte and phonolite. Repeated eruptions along the same general fracture trend have built the central ridge of Tenerife. This walk starts from the summit of El Teide, which you can reach on the cable car (Teleferico, buy a one-way ticket). Its a popular ride, so go early to beat the queues. Not many people walk down, though its not strenuous. The route is due east to Montana Blanca, and then south to the road, say 3 hours for this trip. Remember the top is over 3700 metres: if the weather is questionable leave it for another day: after all, the idea is to see the geology!

The views from the top are just marvellous.  Gran Canaria around 100 km distant can sometimes appear to be close by, floating above the clouds. To the southwest some 3 km is the old peak, Pico Viejo, with its 1 km-wide explosive crater, photo 8:

Probably El Teide looked much like this before the crater filled and a new cone, the current top, was built. You can walk to the Pico Viejo vent but the terrain is really rough, as you can see in photo 9. The path in that picture terminates very soon, so you'd have to allow plenty of time to cross the lavas, and preferably go in a group. If you go, continue down to the Chio road, at the Mirador, as its a hard walk back to the Teleferico. You need a permit to enter the crater of Pico Viejo.

Because there is some risk from gasses in the summit crater,  El Teide is only accessible with a permit, which you get from the park authorities' office in person (take your passport too). So if its important to you to see the vent you need to plan ahead.  The address for a permit is: ICONA, Office P. N. de Teide, Calle Emillio Calzadilla 5, 38002, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Phone 922 29 01 29 or 922 29 01 83

So we now walk due east, you can smell sulphur and there are some fumeroles by the path. In a few minutes all the touristas are left behind and its quiet, except for the wind.  There is a safe enough path, seen in photo 10, winding its way down the steep phonolite-covered flanks. It leads past a refuge hut for climbers.

As you walk down, reflect that people used to climb up here commercially for ice!

The complex flow infill of the caldera floor is clearly seen far below (photo 11). These flows are south to southeast-directed from Montana Blanca which is at the bottom right of the photo, and easterly from Montana Rajada which again is phonolite making the rougher country in the centre of the picture. Note the scoria cones just left of centre. And the southeast caldera wall is beautifully exposed.

After about 2 km we reach Montana Blanca, photo 13. If its cloudy you'd want to have a compass now, to make sure that you didn't miss the southward turn we'll make. 

An amazing sight here on the pale yellow-white pumice is the huge balls of obsidian lava which are called Teide's eggs (Huevas del Teide), they've come rolling off the front of the nearby flows and would have been impressive as they bounced downhill. Photo 14 shows one of the biggest ones, with the snout of the parent lava flow behind it.

Now we walk south to the road, past the west flank of Montana Rajada (photo 15, note the domes of phonolite) which is a remarkable place, its appeared in some science fiction movies. 

And finally walk back 3 km to the Teleferico, if that's where the car is, please be careful of traffic where the road is narrow at the retaining wall sections. 

So that's it, a great day. See you in Ecuador, on Cotopaxi? That's a bit higher.

This article is copyright to Highland Geology.  We make no representation that the places described are freely or safely accessible: especially in bad weather they may be unsafe places to visit. Of course, its always a risk to visit volcanoes.