You’ve got a week in Tenerife and you’re already thinking beyond the sun lounger. Good. Because the island is genuinely more interesting than most people give it credit for, and the best day trips from Tenerife aren’t the ones filling the racks in your hotel lobby.
They’re the ones that take a bit of effort, occasionally an early start, and sometimes a slightly terrifying mountain road. Worth every minute of it, though.
What Most People Actually Do (And Why It’s Not Enough)
Most tourists in Tenerife do Siam Park, maybe a boat trip, and then spend the rest of the week on the beach wondering if they should have hired a car. That’s fine, genuinely, but the island has a completely different personality once you get off the main drag between Los Cristianos and Playa de las Américas.
The south is warm, flat, and built for people who want to switch off. Nothing wrong with that. But Tenerife is also ancient forest, dormant volcano, medieval streets, and wild black sand beaches where the Atlantic comes crashing in and there’s not a sun lounger in sight. You can have both. You just have to choose to go looking.
Teide: The One Everyone Recommends (They’re Not Wrong)
Mount Teide is the highest point in Spain, it’s a UNESCO World Heritage site, and it gets around four million visitors a year. I’m telling you that not to put you off but because it explains why timing matters so much.
Go early. Leave your resort before 8am if you can manage it. The road through the national park is quiet, the light is low and golden over the volcanic rock, and the air at 3,700 metres has this cold, mineral sharpness that hits you the moment you get out of the car. By 11am the car parks are rammed and the cable car queue can stretch well over an hour.
If you want to go to the actual summit, you’ll need a free permit booked in advance through the official Spanish national parks permit system. Book it before you travel. Genuinely. I’ve watched people arrive at the top of the cable car and find out on the spot that they can’t go further. It’s not a good moment.
Even without the summit, the drive through the park is worth doing for its own sake. Pull over at the Roques de García viewpoint and stand there for a few minutes. The shapes of those eroded rock towers against the wide open sky don’t look entirely real. In a good way.
The Masca Gorge: The Trip That People Talk About for Years
Masca is one of those places that sounds like hype until you actually get there.
It’s a tiny village in the Teno mountains in the northwest, reached by a road that winds and drops so sharply that your passengers will stop making conversation entirely. The village itself is beautiful in a worn, quiet, slightly forgotten way: a handful of old stone houses, a couple of small restaurants serving papas arrugadas with mojo, cats asleep on warm walls.
The gorge walk starts just below the village and drops down through a steep ravine to the sea. It takes about three to four hours. The ground is loose in places, it’s hot, and your knees will know about it the next day. At the bottom there’s a small beach, cold water, and a boat that takes you back to Los Gigantes. You can’t walk back up, so you do need to book the boat in advance.
It’s one of the best day trips from Tenerife by some distance. Not easy, but genuinely memorable in a way that “we went to the waterpark” isn’t.
Check trail conditions before you go, as the gorge has had closures due to rockfall. A quick search before you set off is worth it.
Anaga: The Part of Tenerife That Catches People Off Guard
I should mention this before anything else, because it’s the trip most people skip and the one I’d push hardest: Anaga doesn’t look like the Tenerife you’ll find on a Google image search.
The Anaga peninsula in the far northeast is covered in laurisilva forest, one of the oldest types of woodland on Earth. It’s cool and green and damp in a way that feels completely at odds with the sunny south. When the mist rolls in off the Atlantic through the tree canopy, the whole place smells of moss and wet earth. You can hear the wind working through the branches before you can see the trees properly.
The village of Taganana sits at the bottom of a spectacular road that drops through the forest to a valley that feels like it was cut off from the rest of the island a long time ago. The bar at the bottom does a decent set lunch. From there it’s a short walk to the black sand beach at Benijo, where the waves come in hard and there are no parasols, no pedalo hire, and no piped music. Just sea and rock and wind.
Anaga is the answer to “is there anything different to do in Tenerife?” and the answer is very much yes. For more on what to expect and some useful local tips before you make the drive, it’s worth checking out the Anaga article on The Tenerife Forum.
La Laguna: A Proper Town, Not a Tourist Attraction
San Cristóbal de La Laguna is a UNESCO World Heritage city, which sounds like the sort of thing written on a sign. But spend a morning there and it makes sense.
It’s a university town, full of students on bikes, independent coffee shops, bookshops with precarious piles of paperbacks in the doorways, and colonial architecture in those faded terracotta and ochre tones that look better slightly worn than they ever would freshly painted. The streets are laid out on a grid, so it’s easy to wander without getting properly lost.
You get there on the tram from Santa Cruz, which takes about 25 minutes and costs almost nothing. That alone feels like a novelty if you’ve been based in the south.
There’s no single thing to go and see in La Laguna. That’s sort of the point. It’s a place to walk and eat and sit outside somewhere with a coffee and watch a town going about its day. After a week of resorts built entirely around tourism, that feels surprisingly refreshing.
Los Gigantes and the Whale Watching Question
Everyone asks about whale watching in Tenerife. The answer is: yes, and the west coast is where you want to be doing it.
The waters off Los Gigantes are home to resident populations of pilot whales and bottlenose dolphins. These aren’t migratory sightings; they live there. Boats go out most mornings from the small harbour and sightings are frequent enough to be genuinely reliable. If you want to do this, choose an operator who keeps their distance and doesn’t chase the animals. The Whale and Dolphin Conservation charity has clear guidance on what responsible whale watching looks like, and it’s worth a read before you book.
The cliffs themselves are worth seeing from the water too. Six hundred metres dropping straight into the sea. You don’t get a real sense of the scale from the shore.
After the boat, eat at the harbour. The fish is fresh, it’s not expensive by comparison with resort restaurants, and the setting with those cliffs behind the boats is the kind of thing you’d frame if you got a decent photo of it.
Do You Actually Need a Hire Car for Day Trips in Tenerife?
Honestly, for the best ones, yes.
You can get buses to some places and organised tours to others, but Teide and Anaga in particular are so much better when you can pull over when you want to, take a different road back, or just sit somewhere quiet for twenty minutes without a group itinerary telling you to get back on the coach.
Hire cars in Tenerife are cheap and the roads, once you’re off the fast southern motorway, are quiet. The mountain roads are narrow in places, but they’re well maintained and signposted. If you’re not comfortable with winding roads and steep drops, the gorge road to Masca might not be for you, but everything else is manageable.
How Many Day Trips Can You Fit Into a Week?
Two or three proper ones, if you’re being realistic. More than that and you’ll spend your holiday tired rather than rested.
A full day at Teide is a full day. Masca, if you’re doing the gorge, is a full day too. Anaga can be done as a half day if you’re just driving through with one stop, or a longer day if you’re walking. La Laguna is easy, a morning or afternoon is enough. Los Gigantes and the boat trip can be done together.
Pick two or three things that actually interest you rather than trying to see everything. That way you’ll come back having done things properly instead of feeling like you rushed through a checklist.
The One Thing Nobody Mentions About Day Trips from Tenerife
The drive back in the evening, when it’s cooler and quieter and the light is going down over the Atlantic. It’s one of those things that sounds small and turns out to be the bit you remember most.
That’s Tenerife at its best, really. Not the thing you planned. The bit that happens around it.
If you found this useful and you’re still in the planning stage, there’s plenty more honest, local knowledge over at The Tenerife Forum, where people who actually live on or visit the island regularly answer questions without trying to sell you anything.