The Two Sides of Tenerife

09.10.09 | 10:10 AM ET

It was my fourth day in the Canary Islands when I thought of Donald Rumsfeld. The former Secretary of Defense, you will recall, famously divided a continent into “Old Europe” and “New Europe” (using criteria that were more along the lines of American sympathies than vaunted antiquities). But the image—in my mind—of smoky cafes and self-parking cineplexes stayed planted, and recently rose to the surface in Tenerife.

My first three days were spent in the north of the island. The lobby of my hotel was decorated with objets d’art, as was the corridor leading to my room. At breakfast, soft-spoken families picked their way through an eclectic buffet (which included soft pretzels for homesick Bavarians). They whispered in a motley of languages and had that European ability to dress for vacation and still look chic.

The hotel sat on a hill overlooking the town of Puerto de La Cruz. Steep winding streets led down to a tight cluster of shops and banks that eventually opened up to a rock-strewn shore. Old Europe meets the sea. The rocks were black and crawling with locals out for a swim.

A cobblestone street led past an Irish pub, dipped down to a small port-cum-beach, and then cut back to the town plaza. Families strolled, children played, Russian workers rested their weary souls on benches, the occasional woman passed in a hijab, young African men drifted listlessly from one potential customer to the next, one arm serving as a portable jewelry store. At night, in another timeless ritual, an Elvis impersonator played one of the cafes.

The owner of El Templo del Vino was German. But the menu featured the typically fractured syntax (“We dispose about cheese from all over the world.”) and delicious tapas: octopus salad, grilled squid, small green peppers, as well as rabbit and the famous “wrinkled potatoes” (small spuds boiled with sea salt until the skins shrink).

The place had the feel of a distant, diluted Spain.

A Cuban bar, Pub Cana de Azucar, sat just up the street from the plaza. Sugar cane was the principal crop of the Canaries until it became the mainstay of the West Indies. (Here it was replaced by bananas.) Poor economic conditions in the 19th century caused large numbers of Canarians to leave the islands. Many went to Cuba; others, later, to Venezuela. (Which means that, thanks to Castro and now Chavez, a lot of Miamians have Canarian blood.) The language spoken in the Canaries is closer to Caribbean Spanish, with its propensity for swallowed endings, than it is to Castilian. The music of Cuba, a New World country stuck in the past, gave the bar a retro feel. Most of the patrons looked to be locals.

A still older Europe was found in the stately mansions of nearby La Orotava. (It is amazing what you can do to a house by sticking an ornate wooden balcony on an outside wall.) Farther to the north, La Laguna had the languid air of a university town during summer recess, as well as a reputation for nightlife. Which seemed at odds with the story of the young man of good family who was executed on the main plaza while his lover was made to watch from the windows of the convent from which she had escaped, and in which she was condemned to spend the rest of her life.

Even the port city of Santa Cruz—hometown of José Martí‘s mother, now famous for the concert hall designed by Calatrava—had a gracious downtown, with streets lined with Royal Poinciana trees and a Plaza de Espana that mimicked Madrid’s.

Then I traveled to the other side of Mt. Teide, the tallest mountain in Spain. It rose like a dividing wall in the middle of the island, and appeared to cut Tenerife in two halves, not just north and south but ancient and modern, workaday and holiday. Going from La Laguna to Playa de Las Americas is like driving (in less than two hours, with fewer changes in temperature) from Quebec City to Miami Beach. You discover Rumsfeld’s vision of a bipolar continent on an island in the Atlantic.

Even the land flattened a bit, though there were hills behind the new developments, many of them already terraced with houses. Everything looked open, spacious, bright, recently built (or under construction). Here, along the coast at least, was New Europe on vacation (or in retirement): descending the slide of a Thai-themed water park, whale-watching on a boat with commentary in four languages, sipping gazpacho adorned with a spool of sea salt foam, smoking post-coital cigarettes on 800 thread count sheets.

There is apparently a wilder side to southern Tenerife; if European students had Spring Break, this is where they’d spend it. But my hotel, like many of the resorts, had created its own world, a vast complex of shops and restaurants and lounges and one of the largest swimming pools in Europe. (New Europe = Big Europe.) To get to it you descended from the spacious open-air lobby down a flight of stairs (where’s Scorsese when you need him?) and walked through a monumental courtyard, its regimental arches always giving me the feeling that I was strolling down a modernistic version of Via Roma in Turin. The walk to my room was down a long, stark, shadowy corridor.

Techno music pounded softly. The breakfast buffet included rice crackers along with tortilla Espagnole. In the evening, guests sipped mojitos while stretched out on beds in the outdoor lounge. Despite snatches of Spanish, it didn’t feel like Spain; it was one of those neutral places with no identity beyond its allegiance to fashion. It catered to people from places like Birmingham and Hamburg and Moscow and Toledo who have timeworn streets and age-old practices and moody skies back home, and who on holiday want nothing more than to bask in the sunny anonymity of the hip.

Yet even in this place you could hear late at night, when everyone else was asleep, the primeval shrieks of stray cats fighting.

©2026 World Hum, All Rights Reserved