Tenerife Magazine’s round up of some of the most interesting news stories of the week in Tenerife.
What Does One of Britain’s Top Travel Editors Think of The Canary Islands?
Not a lot it seems. In response to a tweet stating that the editor of Saga, Emma Soames, thinks Tenerife is only good for getting a tan, Jane Knight, travel editor of The Times, responded on the social media platform Twitter – ‘I just don’t get the canaries. Give me the balearics any day’.
Each to their own and all that but when it was suggested she should try outside of the resorts she came back with ‘…have been outside resorts and not impressed.”
How far outside of the resorts she ventured we don’t know for sure but there was a Jane Knight who co-wrote an article about the Canary Islands in The Guardian a few years ago that included this statement: ‘If escaping the well-worn tourist trails of Tenerife is your aim you can’t get further away than this stunningly positioned lodge-style parador which is over 2,000 metres above sea level.”
Sorry Jane but a visit to the parador in Teide National Park, the most visited spot on Tenerife, isn’t really what we’d consider escaping the well-worn tourist trails.
Always Pointing the Finger at Others
Some news reports this week blamed the authorities in Arona for not warning bathers about a threat of stinging jellyfish in the sea near Los Cristianos. It’s claimed that local fisherman knew about the threat of jellyfish invasion for weeks before it happened but no warning was raised by the local council. There are two things about this that makes the criticism smack of political shenanigans. The first is that if local fishermen knew about it, then so did every other Canario in Los Cristianos ““ word of mouth is still one of the main ways news travel about this island. Secondly, although there is now a warning flag in place, there is always the danger of meeting something in the sea that will bite you, sting you or stick spines in the soles of your feet. People shouldn’t have to be told that it’s sensible to keep an eye on what’s sharing the water with them whatever the situation. If you wish for a nanny state, you run the risk of creating a situation where people are as dependant as babies.
TV Watching in the Canary Islands
There are a couple of reasons why it might not come as a surprise to learn that people in The Canary Islands watch the least hours of television in the whole of Spain, averaging just under 4 hours a day (239 minutes). The first is obviously the weather. Who wants to spend their time indoors when you’ve got a climate like this? The second is Canarian TV ““ it’s not very good (anyone who claims otherwise hasn’t seen quality TV in a long, long time) and doing anything else is preferable. But maybe that’s a chicken and egg situation; why invest in good television if people aren’t watching it? Aragón came in as the Spanish region where people have the squarest eyes with 275 minutes a day. How do Canarian TV habits compare to the UK? You might think it would be a lot less but stats claim that UK viewers only watch 4 hours 2 minutes on average per day… or so they say.
Not Much of a Sea Defence
Poor little San Andrés. Nearly every time there are weather alerts for high tides and wild seas, the little fishing village outside of Santa Cruz finds its promenade, and the businesses that line it, flooded. Following serious flooding in September last year, the sea wall and defences have been strengthened to try to prevent this happening again. Last weekend’s weather alert was the first test… and it failed. Although the waves were nowhere near as high as last September’s, they still breached the sea wall reaching as far as the fort on the edge of the town. Residents are concerned that when really high tides arrive the new defences will be next to useless. The people responsible for designing the new defences were unable to comment as they were too busy building chocolate fire-guards.
And finally the TIT (This Is Tenerife) of the week award goes to”¦ Tenerife Magazine
Snow was forecast for Mount Teide this week and the summit was hidden behind thick cloud as temperatures dropped. So when someone posted on Facebook a spectacular picture taken from Playa de las Canteras on Gran Canaria of the snow clad peak of Teide we jumped on it and posted the picture on Tenerife Magazine’s Facebook wall. It wasn’t long before a few people pointed out that there wasn’t actually any snow on Teide. A quick check of webcams confirmed that Teide was indeed snow-less. We expected snow and someone gave us evidence… false though it turned out to be. Why anyone would want to post a picture of Teide in snow and claim it was taken that day when it clearly wasn’t is a mystery. But we did note that the original poster was a sociology professor at La Laguna so maybe it was a sociological experiment. If only they’d waited a week, then Mount Teide might actually look like that.
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