Getting Around Tenerife: Transfers, Hire Cars and the Roads You Will Actually Drive

Tenerife is bigger than it looks on a map, and the driving times are longer than the distances suggest. Getting this wrong at the planning stage is the difference between a relaxed week and one spent in a car.

Two airports, and they are not interchangeable

This is the single most common planning mistake.

• Tenerife South (TFS), Reina Sofía, serves the southern resorts. If you are staying in Costa Adeje, Playa de las Américas or Los Cristianos, you want this one — it is roughly twenty minutes away.
• Tenerife North (TFN), Los Rodeos, sits near La Laguna in the north. It handles most inter-island flights and some mainland routes. From there to the southern resorts is well over an hour.

A cheaper flight into the wrong airport is rarely cheaper once you have paid for the transfer, and it costs you two hours of holiday.

Do you actually need a hire car?

Honestly: it depends entirely on what you plan to do.

You probably do not if you are staying in one resort, using the beach and the pool, and taking a couple of organised trips. Parking in the resorts is tight, and you will pay for a car that sits still for six days.

You probably do if you want to explore the north, the Anaga hills or the smaller coastal villages at your own pace, and you are comfortable on mountain roads.

There is a middle path that most visitors overlook: no car, and transfers arranged for the specific days you are going somewhere. Every excursion we run includes them, which is usually cheaper than a week's hire plus fuel plus parking.

What the roads are actually like

The TF-1 motorway along the southern coast is modern, fast and unremarkable. Most people's mental image of driving in Tenerife comes from this road, and it is misleading.

Once you leave it, the character changes completely:

• Mountain roads climb through long sequences of hairpins. They are well surfaced and perfectly safe, but slow. A forty-kilometre drive can take well over an hour.
• The north is greener, wetter and often cloudy when the south is in full sun. Do not be alarmed — that is the trade winds doing what they always do.
• Anaga and Masca have genuinely narrow sections with passing places. If you are a nervous driver, these are the roads people mean when they warn you.

Rule of thumb: whatever your map application says, add half again for anything off the motorway.

If you want the roads without the driving

The island's interior is arguably better experienced from something other than a hire car. A buggy tour or quad tour takes you onto tracks a rental agreement forbids, with somebody else navigating. A luxury car is the opposite instinct — the coastal roads are genuinely enjoyable in something worth driving.

Parking, fuel and the small print

• Fuel is cheap by UK and mainland European standards — the Canaries have a distinct tax regime.
• Blue bays are paid parking, white are free, yellow means no. Resort centres fill early in the day.
• Check the excess on any hire agreement, and photograph the car before you drive it away. This is the single most common source of complaints.

The short version

Fly into TFS if you are staying south. Skip the hire car unless you are genuinely going exploring. Whatever the map says about drive times off the motorway, add half again.

If you would rather not think about any of it, that is the point of what we do — give us your dates and flight times and the transfers are handled from the moment you land.