The ship docked at the port of Santa Cruz de Tenerrife around 7:00 am, as promised. The sea was not too bad last night. The main problem was that the veranda furniture on the cabin next to ours was banging around too much. Why it didn’t bother the occupants, I don’t know.
Our tour does not start until 9:30 am, so we got up about 8:00 am and had breakfast in the Colonnade. We met on the pier with the others to begin our 4.5 hour visit to the Mount Teide National Park.
Tenerife is totally different from El Hierro. It is very commercial and its main business is tourism. Supposedly they once were self sufficient in nearly everything but, starting in the 1970’s, they decided tourism was the wave of the future. Now they import virtually everything. They have nearly five million tourists visit the island each year. It is the most populated of the Caranry Islands with about 900,000 (about 43% of all the Canary Islands). The island is 785 sq miles compared to El Hierro’s 278 sq miles and La Palma’s 706 sq miles. The port is on the northeast side of the island. The national park is actually the caldera (crater) of the Mount Teide Volcano. The caldera is over 9 miles in diameter (29 miles in circumference). It took us about two hours to drive to it. According to our guide Pepe, the last volcano, Teide, erupted and has been inactive since 1909, was roughly 8,000 meters (26,000 feet) above sea floor before it collapsed forming the caldera, about 200,000 years ago. The current remaining peak Mount Teide ( the tallest mountain in all of Spanish territory) stands 12,270 feet above sea level. The speculation is that the volcano will never erupt again.
The coach ride up was interesting. At about 1000 meters we drove through the clouds and emerged into bright daylight. At about 2,000 meters we left the lush pine trees and entered a barren landscape. The pine trees are the same Canary Pines as Ralph told us about on El Hierro. They are resistant to forrest fires. Pepe said that forrest fires are common, but the trees will just burn off the pine needles and turn the bark black. After a couple of years, they will start to grow again and after five years they will be back to normal.
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