Tenerife Day 5 - Mount Teide

Mount Teide on Tenerife is an active volcano and the highest mountain in Spain. It last erupted in 1909. Access to the summit is allowed only by permit from the Spanish National Park service, in order to restrict the number of visitors and damage to the environment. We had applied in advance for permits, so only had a time-slot of 3pm to 5pm today to be at the top. Fortunately the weather looks reasonable.

There's a cable car which takes tourists up to about 200m from the top - it's not for us of course, we're doing it the hard way!

Since the books say it's about a 5 hour ascent and a 4 hour descent, and sunset is about 6:30pm, we timed our start for 10am in order to get to the summit at the right time, but back down before dark.We left the apartment at 8:30am to drive up to the Caldera, stopping at a viewpoint on the way.

We parked the car in the small walkers car park which is at about 2340m (7677ft) and duly set off at 10am.

To start with it's an easy track through almost desert-like yellow ash fields. The landscape all around is like nowhere else, very little vegetation and a huge variety of rock formations stretching into the distance.

The dark rocks are "Teide Eggs", snowball-like formations from later eruptions which have overtaken their own flows.

We also see some of the flora which only occurs here, this is the Teide Violet.

After a few km the serious climbing starts, though the path is very good. At about 1:30pm we reach the Refugio de Altavista at 3270m (10,728ft) where we stop for a snack.

At 3550m (11,647ft) we reach the height of the top cable car station, so it's much busier here. Still a bit of climbing to get to the top though. After showing our permits at the ranger station we head on up. We're a little early for our time-slot but it doesn't seem to matter.

The oxygen is noticeably thinner here, making the going a bit harder.

Finally at about 2:30 we reach the top at 3718m (12,198 ft). We'd climbed 1378m (4520ft) of ascent in 4.5 hours. The landscape and views are stunning here. There are fumaroles here emitting sulphur dioxide and hydrogen sulphide, and the ground is hot to the touch near them.

There's a lot of cloud around down nearer sea level, so we can't see a huge distance all around, but the remoteness up here is very noticeable. Although the temperature is about zero there's very little wind and we're still in sunshine so it's quite pleasant. We have the rest of our lunch here.

We started our descent about 3pm and about all that can be said is that it was a LONG way down. The last, easy stretch in particular seemed never-ending. Finally we got back to the car about 6:30 as the sun was setting.

We drove back to the apartment, had some beer and pizza and had an early night.