With thermometers nudging the high 30s on Tenerife for the past week or so, it’s a good time to take a look at some favourite ways to keep cool in the tropical heat.
1. Visit a Water Theme Park
The most fun way to keep your cool on Tenerife is to spend the day at Siam Park where the sweat you work up waiting in line will rapidly dissipate as you hit the water from the terrifying heights of the Tower of Power, hurtle along the Mekong Rapids or enter the vortex of the Dragon.
2. Dive into the Sea
With so many great dive sights around Tenerife, it’s worth donning the leather and lead and reaching almost boiling point before diving beneath the waves for the delicious cool of the depths. Also, it’s very James Bond to emerge from the water, unzip your wetsuit and stride up the beach, provided of course you’ve got a body like Daniel Craig or Halle Berry.
3. Strip off at a Nudist Beach
There’s nothing quite like feeling the breeze in places it doesn’t normally visit to lower the body heat, especially if you head to El Médano’s nudist beaches of La Tejita or La Pelada where the breeze can be of gale force power. Just be prepared to pay a visit to chafe city when you also get sand in places it doesn’t normally visit.
4. Drink a Cocktail
Find yourself a nice shady table at one of Tenerife’s stylish bars and order yourself a long, cool cocktail. Try a zingy, refreshing Mojito or a tangy Mai Tai to bring the temperature down from the inside out or sip a Black Russian through a straw before seeing the day out with a Tequila Sunrise. By that time you’ll be impervious to everything, including the heat.
5. Visit the Botanical Gardens
It’s not until you’ve reached the gates of the incredible Botanical Gardens in Puerto de la Cruz in blinding heat, and then stepped into the delicious cool of its canopy that you realise how incredibly efficient Mother Nature is at keeping her cool. Giant strelitzas, towering palm trees and leaves the size of festival tents all conspire to produce an air conditioned jungle.
6. Take a Shady Stroll
Escape the heat of the coast and head up into the interior to find natural shade and the pure scent of pine on dappled forest trails. There are loads of paths to choose from which will take you through spectacular landscapes with stunning coastal views and if you choose wisely, will end at a bar where you can reward yourself with a cold Dorada ““ bliss.
7. Get Soaked by a Whale
Spend a day at Loro Parque where, not only can you visit Europe’s largest artificial iceberg and watch jealously as the penguins sit beneath their snow shower, but you can also grab one of the front rows for the Orca Show. You’ll be issued with waterproof aprons but they’ll prove useless as around 6 tons of Orca hits the water and displaces most of it over you.
8. Go underground
It’s a well known fact that the ambient temperature in caves is the same year-round, so do what The Jam did in 1980 and head to the outskirts of Icod de los Vinos and the 27,000 year old Cueva Del Viento volcanic tube. And while you’re keeping your cool, remember to duck or you just might lose your head in there.
9. Swim in Lago Martiánez
It’s a strange phenomenon, but whatever the time of year and no matter how broiling the temperatures get, the lake at Lago Martiánez in Puerto de la Cruz always stays several degrees colder than the Atlantic Ocean. But when you’ve been slowly tanning on the terraces of this iconic swimming pool complex like a chicken on a spit, it’s as refreshing as a cold shower.
10. Go Dolphin Watching
When the sand’s so hot it burns your feet through your flip flops, there’s only one thing left to do; jump ship and catch a sea breeze while you cruise the waters off the western coast for sight of a dolphin pod. Watching these magnificent creatures as they glide their silver bodies through the surf is one of the coolest things to do on the planet.
