Teide

PeaksCanary Islands,Spain

The highest point in Spain at 3,715 metres, standing on a lava plain inside a sixteen-kilometre caldera, climbed by permit above a sea of cloud.

September·Peaking now

Jul–Sep

High summer is the park at its fullest: skies at their driest and clearest, the cable car on its longest hours, and the trade-wind sea of clouds most reliable below the peak. The Milky Way's core rides highest — the prime stargazing window.

Year-round Teide floats above a sea of cloud year-round; late-spring tajinaste blooms and dark, clear nights are the seasonal peaks, and winter can bury the caldera in snow.

Teide is the highest point in Spain, a 3,715-metre volcano on Tenerife that stands on a plain of black lava inside a caldera sixteen kilometres wide. The caldera, Las Cañadas, is the collapsed shell of an older and taller mountain. Its floor of red and ochre lava, cinder cones and wind-cut towers is so like Mars that space agencies drive their rovers over it before launch. Climbing Teide takes you out of the weather. A cable car lifts you from 2,356 metres to 3,555 in about eight minutes, breaking through the trade-wind cloud into sunlight above a white sea. Only a couple of hundred people a day are let onto the last stretch to the crater rim, so the top is nearly empty, and up there the ground steams faintly with sulphur under your boots. The neighbouring islands stand out of the cloud below you. Down on the caldera floor the Roques de García stand in a row, cut by wind; the slenderest, Roque Cinchado, leans with the cone behind it in the most photographed view on Tenerife. In late spring the grey floor flushes red with tajinaste, which grows on this island and no other. It spends two years or more as a rosette of silver leaves, throws up one three-metre spike of red flowers, sets seed and dies. To the Guanche, who had Tenerife before the Spanish, the mountain was Echeyde, hell, with a demon shut inside it; they read the pale plug of rock capping the summit as the seal. Late in the day the caldera walls deepen to copper and the mountain lays its own shadow across the plain as a triangle. Then the sky takes over: more than three hundred clear nights a year, and the Milky Way standing over the caldera. The observatory on the ridge is up here for the same reason the cable car is — above that cloud, the air hardly ever closes.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Apply online for the free summit permit weeks ahead — only a limited number reach the crater rim each day, and slots for the Telesforo Bravo trail vanish long before you arrive.
Come up after dark for the observatory-grade sky — with the cable car closed you drive, so plan for a late return; the galactic core stands highest from spring to autumn.
Dress for winter even in August — at 3,555 metres the air is thin and far colder than the coast, and the summit trail can turn icy or close after snow.
The last cable car up beats the tour buses — most coaches arrive mid-morning, so a first or late ride finds the Roques de García loop and viewpoints almost empty.
For the red tajinaste, aim for mid-May into early June — Tenerife's flower spikes bloom only once, then die, so the window is short and shifts a week or two each year.

Things to do

1
Climb the Telesforo Bravo trail to the crater
A cable car lifts you from 2,356 metres to the La Rambleta station in about eight minutes, past twisted lava into thin bright air. From there a steep permit-only path switchbacks the final stretch to the crater rim at 3,715 metres, the highest point in Spain. The permit is free but capped at a couple of hundred people a day and books out weeks ahead. At the top the ground still steams faintly with sulphur.
2
Loop the rock towers of Roques de García
Walk the circular trail beneath these wind-sculpted pillars, where the slender Roque Cinchado leans against the distant cone of Teide in Tenerife's most photographed view. The layered, twisted rock underfoot records one eruption stacked on another.
3
Catch the caldera at golden hour
As the sun drops, the red-and-ochre lava walls of Las Cañadas deepen to burning copper and the shadow of Teide stretches across the plain. On many evenings the sea of clouds below turns pink, and the peak seems to float above it.
4
Trace the Milky Way over the Teide Observatory
Under one of Europe's darkest skies, with more than 300 clear nights a year, the stars come out in numbers you never see from a city. From spring to autumn the bright core of the Milky Way arcs over the caldera, the same sky the Teide Observatory was built to study.