tenerife holiday accommodation
tenerife holiday accommodation
tenerife holiday accommodation, canary isles, self catering , apartment, tenerife holiday accommodation Puerto de la Cruz (pop. 33,000) is the main tourist resort of the Northern part of the Island. After La Oratava, this is my next favourite place to see and as they are just a 10 minute drive apart, go and see them both. Puerto de la Cruz actually started life as the Port for La Oratava and just kind of grew. There's a great mix of old and new, fortunately a lot more older and typically Canarian looking buildings than new but saying that, a great choice of new and modern hotels. There's a lot of green around the city, more "plazas" (Squares) than I've seen anywhere else and a lot of parks and green - the botanical gardens date from 1788. The city is surrounded by banana plantations and bordered by the sea of course, but also the very scenic La Oratava valley and Esperanza forest and beyond that and very much visible, Mount Teide; so a spectacular sight to see as you approach. For almost 100 years the city has been a popular tourist destination. There's an endless and excellent choice of restaurants and bars, good night life and the small, natural beaches are of black volcanic sand. There's no reef to protect them from the harsher tides so they are not always safe for swimming but to compensate for this, the internationally renowned Canarian artist César Manrique designed a large open-air seawater swimming pool in the town called the "Lago de Martianez". A very impressive public pool only a few meters from the sea with plenty of room to swim and sunbathe. Plaza del Charco in the center is a picturesque and peaceful place to meet, have coffee or during the evenings, watch the street artists that perform there. To the north of the city and the main tourist attraction here you'll find Loro Parque, a spectacular zoo where you could easily spend an entire day.
The capital of the island since 1723, Santa Cruz is home to around 30% of the island population, around 210,000 people. It is a typically busy, bustling, modern Spanish town, with wide avenues, narrow shopping street and a series of suburban residential districts. To be honest with you, it's a nice place for shopping, definately worth a visit if you want to do some serious shopping and avoid the tourist-traps of the south. Head for "Calle Castillo". It's also a nice place for getting of the island by boat but otherwise, not my cup of tea. It's very busy - especially with traffic and whilst there's the odd street or two that's a little appealing to the eye, most of them are pretty dull and dwarfed in building work. I love the island and enjoyed all the towns I went to. So it's not a general island thing, just Santa Cruz isn't my idea of a vacation. There are the odd attractions including monuments, sculptures, museums, art galleries and some nice parks and currenctly under construction down by the harbor is a very impressive auditorium, a bit of a scaled-down Sydney-Opera-kind-of-thing. There's the football stadium and the team are "Primera Liga" at the moment so there's some pretty interesting matches to go see here. Whilst there's no beach in the city (town?) itself, a few kilometers away there is the mile-long, man-made, golden sands of Playa de Las Teresitas which is popular with tourists and usually crowded.
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