Blogs about photography workshops

Treasures of Tenerife

April 30, 2022

When I say Tenerife, most of the people think about the beautiful coastlines, beaches, cocktails and never-ending parties, right?

Would you be interested to visit the island if I would say sleepless and freezing cold nights, exhausting hikes in pitch black, never-ending serpentines, carsickness. If you are a photographer I bet you would pick the second one.

Tenerife hides so many treasures that you can easily spend weeks to discover them all. Especially if you want to visit the magical La Palma island as well.

Planning a trip is really complex and includes multiple challenges, especially if you want to focus only on improving your skills and enjoying the moment…that is where we come in, to take away all the hassle from you. You can find an earlier blog how we search for new spots.
Interested in joining one of our workshops? Get in touch or have a look at the upcoming workshops.

Let’s see an example how we get the most out of the workshops, let’s dive into Tenerife and La Palma.

The first day after arriving to Tenerife and settling down a little after, we prepared ourselves for the long and cold night. The joy starts with a painful elevation of 30 kms serpentine. Our direction was Roques De la Garcia, in the Teide National Park, where you can find the most famous “rock”, as well as the Queen’s shoe, 2000 meters above sea level.

This area has plenty of options for sunrise, sunset and astrophotography. We spent around 9 hours that night from sunset till the Milky way has set, 5:30 in the morning.

If you would consider exhausting – spending a night out in -5 degrees Celsius, being awake the full night and driving 60 kms in carsick mode – you are totally right.

You tell us if it’s worth it.

As our ferry tickets has been rescheduled, we spent the afternoon on different beaches. When you shoot during the day at the beach it’s highly recommended not to forget your ND filters at home.
As the ferry trip was really rough we could not rest a lot before another long and challenging night in La Palma. We hit the coast around 11pm, luckily our motel was planned accordingly to drop our stuff and head immediately to Mirador de Los Andenes.

If you ever want to see a night sky which will blow your mind, travel to La Palma. We have been places in the past few years, this was the darkest sky we’ve ever seen. The magical thing about the island is, that you can ascend above 2000 meters any time, where the sky is clear most of the time, because you are above the clouds.

“At Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (ORM), on the rim of the Taburiente National Park, at 2396 metres above sea level in the municipality of Garafía (La Palma) stands one of the largest arrays of telescopes in the world.” – quoted from the IAC website

This includes the famous Gran Telescopio CANARIAS (GTC), a reflecting telescope with a stunning 10.4 meters primary mirror.

This place needs expertise if you want to get the most out of your shots as the observatories are very sensitive for external lights.

It was pretty easy to spend 3,5 hours there, it was a little race for the best spots. Can you imagine yourself standing there behind your camera?

Our next destination in the morning was a beautiful national park, Caldera de Taburiente, lying in the middle of La Palma, more than 2000 meters above sea level. This magical place is full of treasures, you can spend an entire day here. Our schedule was tighter as our next spot was Cueva de Candelaria, 41kms “serpentines” away. This place is truly magical, a little village inside of a cave. Hard to describe with words, even the pictures stand far away from the arrival moment. It’s a perfect location for sunset, even some Milky Way shots can be executed if you pick the right season of the year.

After the sun has fallen behind the horizon we packed our gear and eagerly drove back to the observatories to explore the missing pieces from the first day. We could spend another 4.5 hours at the observatories and at different viewpoints.

Later that day after a power nap, the ferry took us back to Tenerife with all the memories and SD cards to conquer the Teide observatory.

On the way to the top of Tenerife we had an extra stop for sunset. A breathtaking viewpoint called Mirador de Masca is just a step away from the car park. We did not have the best light conditions, however we have been lucky enough to capture some unique moments. Do you think it worth to stop?

We countninued our journey to the top, thanks for the proper planning, during the night we could visit and capture 5 different spots with totally different compositions. When you have a night sky like you have never seen before, you want to take home all of it on your SD card.

The very last night the conditions turned so bad even on the top of Teide, that we decided to rest and pay more attention for the retouching workshop.

The last day was kind of relaxing, probably we slept too much. We visited some of the most iconic landmarks like Playa de los Roques, the Anaga Rural Park or the Punta del Hidalgo. All of those places are stunning. If you are lucky and have some cloud formations you can capture epic moments.

As disclosure, enjoy the pictures of the last day. We hope that your imagination turned to free flight mode and once we could guide you through these magical places.