A Cyclist's Life in Tenerife (Canary Islands)

Hi-

I am so excited I found your site and service. I will be traveling to Tenerife for a work conference on 1/27 and want to do some serious riding and exploring from around 1/29-2/1.

I am not certain whether I want to go roadie (my preference) or offroad (because the terrain looks unbelievable). At this point it looks like I’ll be traveling solo. I ride a 54 cm in road and 16/medium for offroad.

Can you give me some insight that will help me make a decision about road v. offroad rental? For road riding, I love hills and epic routes. For offroad, although I am in very good shape and enjoy hills, my technical mt. bike skills are not at the same level, so I guess I’d be looking for more cross-country type routes.

I am really looking fwd to it…. not into laying on the beach or shopping, and I most definitely want to spend my vacation riding.

Pls let me know your thoughts as soon as possible, as I want to make sure there will be a bike available.

Many thanks.
/erin kenneally

Thanks,

Well I am both a MTBer and a roadie so I know all about these kinds of «decisions decisions».

The road climb to Teide is definitely an epic route, preferably starting from either La Orotava in the North, La Eperanza in the East or Granadilla de Abona in the South. Where else can you climb constantly from a sea level resort to 2300m (7000 feet) in one ride???!

The bummer with road bikes seems to be traffic around the coastal resorts. However, the local drivers here are extremely considerate when overtaking etc.

To make your descision that much harder, some of the firetrails that criss-cross the upper La Orotava valley are probably the flattest roads (either on or offroad) to be found on the whole island. They are connected by a series of perpendicular «downhill runs». Yes it is possible to get 1 bus to drop you off at the base of Mt Teide so you can ride back down various ways—

There are no jumps and things of that nature. The main obstacles are rocky volcanic boulders and further down, slippery pine needles… so it’s easy for your font tyre to lose its line if you brake and corner at the same time.

Getting back to the road bikes… our road bikes cost basically twice the MTBs because they don’t seem to get abused as much. So we have a beautiful new Pro Lite 54.5cm Cuneo road bike (or 2); one has just been built up last week with the new Ultegra carbon levers! It’s so new I haven’t even had a chance to photograph it yet.

Hope that is of some help.
-Leslie

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