Attending Tenerife sightseeing tours in this biggest island of Canary archipelago offers a lot of various tours, attractions and activities. Tenerife is a great place to visit for people wanting to rest, admire nature, or take part in various activities including amazing sightseeing here. This blog is especially dedicated for sightseeing tours in Tenerife and at the end of this initial article you have listed all the best and easily bookable sightseeing trips in Tenerife.
Discover the island with Tenerife sightseeing tours
That's the right way to spend vacations on the island. A day on the beach, another day go on one sightseiing tour, then spend next day with a water activities, go on another totally different sightseeing tour and so on - it will make an amazing experience for you and a holiday you will remember lifetime.
Sightseeing in Santa Cruz de Tenerife
In the north-eastern part of the island lies Santa Cruz de Tenerife, a capital and island's major city with a population exceeding 200-thousand people. Locals call it simply Santa Cruz and this is one of popular destinations for a day sightseeing tours and shopping. Here everyone will find something for himself in this big and lovely city. For music and architecture enthusiasts, a definite must-go would be Auditorio de Tenerife, a beautiful, sail-shaped opera house inspired by the famous Sydney Opera. Another well-known part of a city's landmark is Santa Cruz towers (Torres de Santa Cruz) - Tenerife's tallest skyscrapers and highest twin towers in Spain. It's also worth to take a look at the city's port - a huge passenger and commercial hub, an important stop for goods transferred between Europe, Africa, and America, considered as one of the three world's most important ports located on the islands. An option to visit the island's capital is to book the City Tour in Santa Cruz de Tenerife from Tenerife South - the best way to discover Santa Cruz. For people seeking a tropical sightseeing sites and rest, an ideal choice would be Playa de Las Teresitas, a wonderful large beach with orange-tinted sand and a calm atmosphere, 15-minute drive away from Santa Cruz.
La Laguna - the pearl of the North
The next sightseeing destination is located on the North of Santa Cruz, merged with the capital, lies the city of La Laguna. While Santa Cruz serves as an island's administrative center, La Laguna has always been a historical and cultural capital of Tenerife and, in the past, also an official one. This little, climatic old town has been declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1999 and naturally attracts many sightseeing tours from the resort areas on the South. It's full of beautiful pastel-coloured historical buildings with carved wooden shutters and a plenty of ornamental churches and cathedrals. The city is also a home to the University of La Laguna, Tenerife's only university and, dating back to 1701, the oldest one in the Canary Islands. The best way to visit La Laguna will be with the La Laguna & Las Mercedes Forest walking tour.
Mysterious Pyramids of Guimar
For everyone interested in getting to see and know more about Tenerife's native people, the Guanche. An interesting experience would be a sightseeing trip to Guimar, where one will find six terraced pyramid-shaped structures build from lava stone by native people, as a result of their agricultural activity. Under one of the pyramids, there's a natural lava cave in which various Guanche artifacts were found, dated back as far as 600 AD. The terrain around the pyramids is now an ethnographic park open to everyone that wants to see himself these intriguing constructions.
Loro Parque - animal's kingdom
One of the most popular sightseeing attractions in Tenerife is its enormous ZOOs and water parks. Loro Parque is a ZOO located in northern Tenerife, near the city of Puerto de la Cruz. Its most famous for their amazing orca, dolphin, sea lion and parrot shows, however, there's a lot more to do here besides them. The park contains a massive amount of various kinds of animals including primates as chimpanzees and gorillas, wild cats as tigers and jaguars, and a lot of sea life - exotic fish, piranhas, seahorses, and sharks. For people interested in plants, there's also a big botanical garden containing a lot of very rare plant species.
Siam Park - must visit at least once
On the water park side, there is Siam Park, a water park situated in Costa Adeje in the southern part of the island. Even the Siam Park is not kind of sightseeing activity, but being the biggest water park in entire Europe, it's truly impressive both in terms of size and the number of attractions it has to offer. It holds the title of the best park in the world. Its main attractions are the amusing, refined in every detail water slides, each with its own theme, for example, Tower of Power - a vertical, 28-meter slide where visitors could achieve speeds up to 80 km/h and pass through a tank full of sharks. Other attractions in the park include Mai Thai River - a world's longest lazy river - and Wave Palace - an artificial white sand beach next to the giant wave pool able to generate the biggest waves in the world with height up to 3 meters.
There are a lot of options for Tenerife sightseeing tours
The island of Tenerife is an ideal place for those who want to spend their holidays by the sea taking boat sightseeing tours in Tenerife. No matter if it means relaxing on the beach or doing intensive water sports. For those more interested in the first option, the island abounds both in big, well-known beaches, like Las Teresitas, El Duque or La Tejita, and in little, calm and hidden ones on which you'll be the only person around. The most famous attraction in this matter is Tenerife's black sand beaches which many types of sand are made from different volcanic rocks, mostly basalt. The warm temperatures of the island make the water around very pleasant to swim in.
As mentioned previously, Tenerife is also a great place for sports and activities connected with the ocean. Some of them are boat sightseeing tours, whale watching, dolphin watching, fishing, scuba diving, snorkeling, surfing, kayaking, windsurfing, paragliding or jet ski in Tenerife. You can also book a yacht trip that will show you the most beautiful sightseeing sights of the Tenerife's coast. If you know how to steer a boat, you can rent a boat in Tenerife and drive it on your own. There's also a lot of boat trips connected to dolphin or whale watching, where these intriguing animals could be seen from a very close distance. Sometimes it's even possible to spot an orca or a shark!
Most of the water sports business is concentrated in the South part of the island and cities of Las Americas, Los Cristianos and Costa Adeje, but it is hard to on the other parts of the island. The best way to discover the other parts are Tenerife sightseeing tours, including bus sightseeing tours, private sightseeing tours in Tenerife, quad sightseeing trips, etc. There are lot of options for sightseeing in Tenerife.
Unique Nature and Climate diversity of Tenerife
How great the entertainment and cultural side of Tenerife wouldn't be, the true reason why would someone visit the island is its natural beauty and huge landscape and climate diversity. It's almost unbelievable how much different microclimates it's possible to cram onto such a small piece of land and it's truly sightseeing paradise. It results in a wide variety of flora and fauna including over fourteen hundred species of plants and many unique, endemic animal species of all classes.
Teide National Park - the most popular sightseeing destination
In the center of the island lies the Teide volcano, which relative height of 3718 meters makes it the tallest volcano in Spain and third largest in the world. It's active and its last eruption dates back to 1909. However, the biggest eruption in Tenerife's history happened a very long time ago - about 150 thousand years ago in an enormous explosion, creating the Las Cañadas caldera separating top part of the volcano with thick stone walls. This is absolute 'must visit' place for every sightseeing tour in Tenerife. Inside the caldera, one can admire a truly martian landscape with rusty-coloured rock formations, broad lava fields and occasional green-tinted rock walls which gained its colour from a corrosion of copper inside it. All of this while seeing a distant peak of Teide in the background, sometimes covered in a thin layer of snow. There are a couple of roads going through the caldera at the Tenerife volcano base. To visit the peak you can either hike all the way from the bottom or take a ride on a funicular train that will bring you 200 meters down from the top. Read more about these hiking opportunities in our special Blog about hiking in Tenerife. The view from this level is indescribable and if you're lucky with the weather you can even see the other six Canarian islands - an amazing sightseeing and views are guaranteed. Besides the volcano and the landscape, the caldera is also home to the major astronomical observatory including solar, radio and microwave telescopes that take the benefit of a very clear sky on a high altitude. All of the terrains inside the caldera comprise the Teide National Park.
Forestal Crown of Tenerife
Terrain down from the caldera changes with the height, transiting from groups of small coniferous trees through the whole forests to standard subtropical flora. The forest, called as Forestal Crown is covering the higher parts of the island includes a large variety of tree and plants species. The steep and hilly ground makes it ideal for quad biking in Tenerife, which you can do booking Forest Explorer quad sightseeing tour. This part of Tenerife is also known for giant pine cones emerging from the trees, that sometimes could reach really impressive sizes. There's also some climatic towns and villages upon the hills. The most famous of them is Vilaflor located on an altitude of 1400-1500 meters making it the highest on the island and whole the Spain. Nearby you can find Piño Gordo - a 45-meter Canarian pine tree with an approximate age of around 800 years which is obvious stop for many sightseeing tours leading from the South to Teide
Tenerife South
South part of Tenerife has an unique, dry climate and desert-like landscape consisting of high temperatures, low precipitation rates, tall rock formations and vast plains of sand and volcanic rocks. The wonderful landscape is completed by a dozen of small roads winding through the hills in serpentines. A ride on such a road is an experience itself, as a drive may include more than 180 degree turns and breathtaking sightseeing views are opening on the one and another side. One of these roads pass through Masca, a small mountain village beautifully located among the hills. In the past this location had also a practical function, as this was the place where pirates were hiding from the Spanish navy forces. The island's western shore is also unique, this time because of enormous Acantilados de Los Gigantes - cliffs falling into the sea from 600-800 meters, which makes them the tallest cliff structures in the entire Atlantic. They're best visible from nearby town Los Gigantes and from ships and yachts passing very near the edge on mentioned yacht trips. If you have a smaller boat or a jet ski you could even enter some of the caves carved in the rocks at the water level.
Anaga - sightseeing paradise of Tenerife
East of Santa Cruz and La Laguna, on the eastern tip of the island lies the Anaga Jungle, a complete opposite of dry, hot west. Taking a sightseeing tour from Tenerife South you can see as the landscape rapidly changes from Mediterranean flora to humid forests and tropical plants that you don't expect to find in this part of the world. A one-kilometre high Anaga Massive lies in the centre of this fascinating microclimate. It's perfectly aligned with the average cloud level, so there's a thick layer of fog covering them nearly all the time. Driving the main road, you can enjoy magnificent sightseeing views of the sea and settlements placed all around the coast. Anaga is full of little, calm villages that appear as forgotten by the world and in which life goes by its own way. Anaga by itself is the wildest part of the island and one of the main destinations for Tenerife sightseeing tours. It's worth to pay an entire day to spend here. The best way to discover Anaga is the Anaga Private Tour, but if you prefer to travel with a big group of other people then Anaga & Two Capitals bus sightseeing tour will be the option as well.
To learn more about endless Tenerife sightseeing sights and spots, you can visit our Blog dedicated to all the Things to do in Tenerife. If you found this article useful and helpful, please, don't forget to share link on your social networks or your own blog, so it will also help others before they travel to Tenerife.
