Back in business on Tenerife
Index
| Date | Peak | Height | PF | Location | MAP |
| 17.12.23 | Montaña de Guama | 877m | 115m | Tenerife, Spain | MAP |
| 17.12.23 | Montaña del Cedro | 2265m | 216m | Tenerife, Spain | MAP |
Montaña de Guama (877m), Dec 17 2023
Sunday: After breakfast at hotel Barceló Santiago, Los Gigantes, Tenerife, we discussed where our first hike should go. My main goal is of course to get mountain tops with a prominence of 100m or more, and we settled for Montaña de Guama – just up the valley.
Anne had purchased the AllTrails app, which had good coverage of hikes all around and also on Tenerife. The app showed a round trip hike from the village Taimamo. It seemed like a good plan for our first hike.
We drove up to Taimamo and just parked in the middle of the village. Or perhaps town is a more correct term. This was a town that I later claimed to be my favourite town on Tenerife. The roads were straight, and parking was plentiful. This was not the kind of village with super-narrow roads where you hold your breath when you drive through. They had space…
We started hiking and tried to navigate to the trailhead that Anne’s app was suggesting, and found they town also had narrow roads…
Eventually, we found the trailhead and we soon crossed a path that we later understood ran all the way from Los Gigantes and up to Santiago del Teide.
The path would first lead us up to a cross and the path was easy to follow.
Eventually, we reached the ridge, and I was blown away by the beauty. I immediately recognized Montaña Ijada, which I hiked solo when we were here in 2015.
We had a good view towards Taimamo from up here…
And then we reached the cross…
After visiting the cross, we continued up the ridge to the main top.
And then we stood on our first Tenerife top on this vacation…
After a short stay, we moved on. After all, this was supposed to be a round trip hike.
We met several hikers on our hike and understood that this was a popular hike.
We enjoyed ourselves – big time!
We noticed a cool hole in the ridge, but we weren’t really motivated to go back up again just for this hole.
We also had a good view towards Los Gigantes and our hotel.
There was also a cool pinnacle that I really wanted to scramble. But I’m not in my prime years anymore and I left it untouched. It’s best that way. For the both of us…
I noticed a goat with her kid just below the pinnacle. We backed away immediately to avoid scaring them into even scarier terrain.
It was tempting to also visit the next top on the ridge (point 623m), but this top clearly didn’t have a prominence of 100m or more and Anne wasn’t really interested. So, we skipped it and sat course for Taimamo.
As we started to see the end of this hike, we realized that we were hungry.
But first, we had to return to town – still 2km away…
It was a great hike and little did we know that we would pass *through* this mountain a few days later…
We drove up to Santiago del Teide for lunch, and stopped by what seems to be a biker’s place…
The burger was great…
Happy with the hike, we decided to go for one more hike and drove up to the plateau below Teide to bag yet another 2000m top…
Trip statistics: 6km, 505 vertical meters, 1h:55m
Pictures (Canon EOS RP/Iphone 13 Pro Max/Samsung Galaxy) from the hike:
Montaña del Cedro (2265m), Dec 17 2023
Sunday: We drove up to Parque National del Teide, below Pico del Teide – which we hiked in 2015. We had been to a number of the peaks up there – El Sombrero, Roque de Los Almendros, Montaña de Guajara, Montaña Pasajirón, Roque de la Grieta – all above 2000m. Today, we focused on Montaña del Cedro.
One thing was for sure; off-trail hiking was out of the question. We parked by the Mirador de las Narices del Teide along TF-38, as this seemed to be a hiking area. But the main trails here don’t cross any tops, so how should we go about this?
On my GPS map, we could see a path cross Roques del Cedro (2191m) and after following the main trail for a few minutes, we located this path.
It was easy to follow, marked with cairns.
The path continued across Roques del Cedro and soon we had Montaña del Cedro ahead of us.
The GPS map indicated that the path would curve around the mountain on the west side. We just would have to wait to see how this would progress. In the meantime, we had enough amazing stuff to look at…
At the foothills of the mountain, the path did indeed turn to the west.
As the path was about to lead us away from the mountain, we noticed a distinct path (marked by cairns) that was clearly a route to the top.
This was good news as we had no intention to be hiking on the lava rock!
Eventually we reached the top and could enjoy the fine views.
It was amazing to see the clouds hitting on the island. We hoped that they would stay put down there…
As we left the summit, we noticed a vague path leading to the south ridge. This path was also marked with small cairns. We decided to follow it. After a rock section, we entered the pine forest. Although vague, we were able to follow the path all the way down to the main trail at the foot of the mountain.
Coming down to the warning signs along the main trail made us ask ourselves if our hike was legit or not. We weren’t quite sure. We had followed paths all the way, but were those paths legit? It was obvious that the black lava rock alongside the main road was off-limits, and we hadn’t gone there. I decided to look this up later. This would anyway be our last hike in this national park.
We now had 2,3km back to the trailhead along a gravel road.
We were hiking below rough and stunning terrain…
Eventually, we returned to the car and called it a day in terms of hiking.
We returned to the hotel and decided to buy a meal upgrade at the hotel, which meant that we would be eating dinner at the hotel restaurant for the rest of the week, for 16 Euro per person. This was a good decision, in terms of the quality of the food and the budget. We had spent 70 Euros at a local restaurant the day before, without begin anywhere near happy with the food…
And we looked forward to what the next day on this island would bring…
Trip statistics: 5,9km, 375 vertical meters, 2h:14m
Pictures (Canon EOS RP/Iphone 13 Pro Max) from the hike:
