There’s a weird thing when you leave somewhere and move on. Well, there is for me. I feel as though there’s a deception of sorts connected with writing about said place too much. I mean, I’m no longer there, what right do I have to write about it? I’m mainly talking about Tenerife here.
And yet, most of the content I see in the media, mainstream or otherwise, reveals a complete lack of knowledge relating to Tenerife, or the Canary Islands. Recent examples have included ‘freak’ waves (so ‘unusual’ they happen every year about the same time) and Fodor’s decision to add the Canary Islands to their 2026 ‘No List.’ Additionally, many travel articles are superficial, poorly researched, and aimed at a mass travel market, so have an extremely limited focus.
Still, for all that, making the decision to pull back on writing about Tenerife wasn’t totally because we left to move to Portugal in 2017. There were multiple reasons.
The ferry which took us to mainland Spain and a new life.
Reasons for not writing about Tenerife
Facing Forward
While both Andy and I like to paddle in the warm memories of the past every now and again, we prefer to look ahead toward the horizon. There’s always a potential new project to concentrate on. Moving to Portugal meant the ‘new project’ involved a whole country. As a result, Tenerife was automatically relegated the second we stepped on the ship from Santa Cruz to mainland Spain. This perpetual seeking the next thing to feed a desire for new experiences can mean, on my part at least, that some things get metaphorically left on the shelf to gather dust, which is why I’ve got two completed novels and a bag of short stories that have yet to be submitted anywhere.
The World Travel Market in London.
Shedding the Tenerife tag
Another motivating factor was we were fed up with being typecast. Having written about Tenerife for many years, we’d gained a reputation as specialists, but only where Tenerife was concerned. Even after writing Slow Travel guides for various other European destinations, the label we had plastered across our foreheads was ‘Tenerife Travel Writers.’ I remember at the World Travel Market in London another travel writer exclaiming ‘Here comes the Tenerife contingent,’ when we appeared. It was true, of course. But it felt like we were solely defined by what we wrote about Tenerife. For years afterwards, we made a conscious effort to change that.
This is a common dish on Tenerife, but I’ve deliberately never referenced it, waiting to see when someone else did. I’m still waiting.
A resource for other writers
Possibly the greatest reason for pulling back from writing about Tenerife was we were absolutely scunnered with other people mining our knowledge and presenting it as their own. We put a lot of information on our Real Tenerife website of the sort which wasn’t usually written about. Much of it would turn up in one form or another in various travel articles. In the most blatant cases, I had to contact writers, bloggers, and travel companies to request they remove what were virtually cut and paste jobs. In some instances, this content even involved uniquely personal experiences.
There were times I’d say to Andy after writing about something which wasn’t widely known, ‘Let’s see how long it is before this turns up in someone else’s travel article.’ Sure enough, on many occasions, it appeared within a couple of days. I could list countless other examples. It reached a point we even considered taking down our Real Tenerife website. We didn’t. Instead, we stopped adding new material. As time passed, the website faded more and more from Google search, languishing in lower pages rather than in the prime position it had enjoyed for many years. Starving potential plagiarists of fuel was satisfying.
The road which inspired the name for Andy’s book The Banana Road.
No longer enchanted
And then there was the experience that led to Tenerife being tainted for us. But you’ll have to read Andy’s book The Banana Road to learn what that was.
A Revelation
A few weeks ago, while walking across hill and vale in the countryside surrounding our village, we had a Damascene moment. Eight years have passed since we left Tenerife. Although, we’ve returned a few times over that period for work purposes, the resulting material has mostly been shared with a selective audience and not published widely. Our objective to cut off a supply of easy information was achieved long ago. In doing so, we also pointed the gun at our own feet by damaging a source of our own income. Our Tenerife guides marketed on the website were popular and profitable. In a bid to move forward while, at the same time, stopping providing free material for others, we completely forgot one important thing. We ARE specialists in Tenerife.
A fiesta in a tiny village in the hills of the Orotava Valley.
We spent fourteen years experiencing life there – from the biggest carnival to tiny fiestas in out-of-the-way villages, while spending time in every single municipality, interviewing a range of people from chefs and politicians, musicians and DJs, to specialist producers and anyone who was willing to chat. We notched up hours in local libraries, community centres, and council buildings, poring over obscure books and records written in Spanish, many which never travel beyond a municipality’s boundaries. We have an extensive library of knowledge that only anyone who has done similar could ever possess. Restaurants and hotels may change, but the insightful information – the culture, history, cuisine, traditions, quirks, local anecdotes, what makes the people who they are, what secrets lie in the depths of remote ravines – doesn’t.
One of the most incredible places on the planet.
And yet, we mostly turned our backs on that knowledge. It is a crazy thing to do, especially for people inhabiting a travel writing world. It has taken eight years to realise this. Maybe it needed eight years before it felt right. Now that it does, it’s time to reacquaint ourselves with an old friend.
