Why I Won’t Watch English Language Movies in Spanish

The obvious answer is that Spanish dubbing is so bad that ripping out your ear drums with a butcher’s hook is kinder to those weird protrusions on the side of your head than subjecting them to The King’s Speech sounding more like Once Upon a Time in Meheeeco.

But that’s not the main reason.

There used to be two mainstream cinema complexes on Tenerife where you could catch the latest-ish movies in their original language; at La Villa in La Orotava and at Gran Sur in Costa Adeje. Each screened one V.O. (version original) a week. Sometimes the movie was good, sometimes it was bobbins.

The one in La Orotava didn’t last long; there’s just not a big enough audience for English language movies in the north of Tenerife.

The south of Tenerife is a different matter. In some municipalities up to 75% of the population are non-Canarios. Not all of these are English speaking, but there’s a massive percentage who are.

And yet every time I’ve been to the Gran Sur Cinema to watch V.O. There has been less than 10 other people in the cinema with me. Doesn’t matter how good the movie is, even the likes of Inception and The Adventures of Tintin didn’t bring in the English speaking crowds.

I just don’t get it. Andy and I think nothing of the 90 minute journey from Puerto de la Cruz to Costa Adeje if the movie warrants it. DVDs are wonderful, but you can’t beat watching BIG movies on the big screen. So, as most ex-pat residents on Tenerife live significantly closer to the cinema, why aren’t audiences bigger? It’s a mystery to me.

The apparent lack of support for the V.O has had me worried that it might be pulled (I say apparent because for all I know, the place is teeming on the days I’m not there).

Sure enough, for the last two weeks the V.O. movie has been absent from Gran Sur. They say that it might be back, but if they don’t re-introduce it I’ll be gutted.

I’ve been a massive fan of the movies since leafing through my mum’s Photoplays when I was knee high to a popcorn seller. I love movies and I especially get a thrill out of seeing them at the cinema.

And because I feel this way about films, I won’t watch dubbed ones.

You might think that as I live in Spain, I should watch movies in Spanish. I do…but only Spanish movies. I also watch French, Chinese, Brazilian, Swedish movies etc…all in their original language (with English subtitles of course).

Movies aren’t just about the visuals – without the performance of the actor, the movie is nothing. And that’s why dubbing is irritating in the extreme.

Dubbing lessens a movie (well maybe not one with Van Damme, Steven Seagal or Chuck Norris). You can’t tell whether a film is good or bad when you’re listening to some wooden performance from a professional dubber. Where’s the richness of voice? Where’s the emotion? Where’s the intonation or the subtlety in the performance? With dubbing you lose all of that…and subsequently you also lose the soul of the movie.

How can people who watch dubbed movies know how good an actor Leo DiCaprio or Brad Pitt is? The answer is that they can’t.

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold was on Spanish TV last week. I’d forgotten how delicious Richard Burton’s voice was. Imagine casting those rich vocals aside for some part-timer from Valencia with a voice that grates like nails down a board.

It would simply be a crime.

Photographing Tenerife, Viewing Things Differently Through a Lens

A thought occurred to me as I focussed my camera on a sun-dappled, tree-lined street populated by smiling strollers wearing chic summer clothing; the women in colourful, light cotton dresses of various lengths that complimented their curves; the men in loose shirts and three-quarter length pants that were both casual and stylish. The camera liked them.

The thought that occurred to me was that my camera likes some places on Tenerife more than it likes others and that has possibly fashioned my view of some of the towns and resorts on the island.

Over the years I’ve photographed many towns, resorts, villages and hamlets on Tenerife for print and web publications. For many of these I use the images to compliment the text by trying to show the subject at its best. This isn’t always easy as there are lots of places on Tenerife that I don’t find particularly photogenic.

You can more or less point and click in La Orotava and get a result

The old towns and cities are easy. There are places like Garachico, La Orotava, La Laguna and Santa Cruz that I could return to again and again and still find new things to photograph. The rural places like Masca and Santiago del Teide have scenery to boost their lack of streets and historic buildings.

Towns with a fishing community have harbours, colourfully bobbing boats, fishing nets piled high and grizzled fishermen and those are always good subject matter.

Hill towns can sometimes pose a challenge, especially when the population has grown and breeze block buildings are in the majority like in Santa Ursula, La Victoria, La Matanza, San Miguel de Abona and Granadilla de Abona. But these have history and there are always quirky corners to uncover.

It's got a church and the buildings are inoffensive - but it's 'blah' lifeless

It’s the purpose built resorts where I struggle. Remove the beach from the equation and there’s usually very little left to interest the camera. Being new they don’t even possess any urban grit.

Funnily, Playa de las Américas, which is often unfairly held up as Tenerife’s tackiest resort by those who don’t know it has a lot of potentially interesting shots. Whereas once I move away from the beach at Playa del Duque in ‘upmarket’ Costa Adeje my camera positively yawns with boredom.

Worst of all are the purpose built resorts without a beach where the architecture is new-ish and often characterless. What the hell do you photograph there? And if there’s no sunshine, forget it. I’ve tried Callao Salvaje, Playa Paraiso, Golf del Sur and Costa del Silencio a number of times and never been satisfied with the result.

I tried to use the holes in the wall in Playa Paraiso...but still no cigar. Just can't get a decent picture.

Of course that could be my limited creativity, but search Flickr for any of the above and the evidence suggests otherwise.

The upshot of this is that there are places on Tenerife that bore me in photographic terms and subsequently I avoid spending time in them.

Another thought occurred to me as I focussed the camera and that was the people in the photograph. I point a camera up La Noria in Santa Cruz and the people in the frame are very, very different than if I point it along the promenade at…say…Puerto Colón. But that is the topic for another blog completely – and I’m not sure I’m brave enough to go there…for the moment.

If there’s anyone who has managed to get really good shots of the places that I mentioned I struggled with (I don’t mean HD, sunsets or over processed so that they don’t match what the eye sees) I’d love to see them.

The Development of Tenerife, the Long & Winding Road

I’ve driven around Las Américas and Costa Adeje many, many times. But I always take what seemed like incredibly circuitous routes to get anywhere.

Last weekend, after crippling myself on 12 Beaches Boulevard I got the chance to see which route Tenerife’s bus drivers used to travel between Los Cristianos and Fañabe.

We had a look at taxis first but, after noticing that the fare from the centre of Los Cristianos just to the port was €5 I figured that as I’d never paid to get screwed, I wasn’t about to start now.

With a bit of advice from bus route guru Colin Kirby, Andy and I boarded the 417 bound for Guia de Isora. From Los Cristianos to just before San Eugenio the route was pretty straightforward, but it was from there I was really interested. Blow me if the bus driver didn’t take the route I thought that I must have always gotten wrong. To get from one part of Costa Adeje to Fañabe on four wheels you really do have to cross the TF1, go round a couple of roundabouts and re-cross it again.

I’ve always suspected I was missing something, but no – it is actually a complete mystery of road planning. It just doesn’t make any sense and betrays that someone wasn’t exactly looking at the bigger picture when they were developing the area.

As we turned this way and that way on a convoluted route from A to B, La Laguna popped into my head. The reason being that when La Laguna was being developed nearly 5 centuries ago, the grid layout used for the town was revolutionary. It was such a logical and clever layout that many South America cities used it as a blueprint.

This thought occurred to me; is it possible that five centuries ago road planners on Tenerife were smarter and more advanced that they are now?

As an epilogue of sorts, when we crossed into the Fañabe the bus headed back towards PDLA before turning and coming to a halt at a bus stop. It was quite a distance from the hotel, so I advised Andy that we should stay on the bus until it got a bit closer.

My heart fell when the bus, instead of taking the road I thought it would, headed right back across the motorway again in the direction of Guia de Isora, presumably because there was no way to rejoin the motorway from the side I wanted to be on (those pesky road planners again). Thankfully we managed to get off on the other side nearly opposite our hotel, so it wasn’t a disaster and we didn’t end up with an unplanned trip to Guia, but it was a close call.

The Problem with Tenerife is that there’s a Lack of TQM.

What is TQM? TQM is a business practice recognised and adhered to by the most professional and efficient organisations – it means Total Quality Management.  It’s something that is utilised to ensure that business practices always meet or exceed customer expectations and requirements.

It might sound like a boring business tool, but it’s something that can affect and transform how you are dealt with, or how you deal with others. It was standard practice in the organisations that Andy and I worked for in the UK, but since we moved here we haven’t seen a lot of evidence of it being utilised.

That doesn’t mean we haven’t dealt with some professional, efficient businesses on Tenerife, it just means that we haven’t seen a lot of evidence of modern standard business practices being applied here.

Shortly after we moved to Tenerife we went to a business planning meeting. When we asked who was taking the minutes, the people we were meeting with looked at us as though we had just said ‘let’s do this naked’.

Taking minutes might sound like overdosing on bureaucracy, but when you’re planning something it helps to have a reminder of who’s going to be doing what and when – it cuts down on potential misunderstandings and mistakes.  No minutes were taken at that meeting and as sure as night follows day, the following week one of the people at the meeting phoned us up to ask if we’d done something that hadn’t even been discussed.

A perfect example of a lack of TQM happened last week when we were staying at the Hotel Isabel in Costa Adeje. The lack of TQM wasn’t anything to do with the hotel which was very professional, it was to do with two glossy, Cabildo (Tenerife Government) produced books that were in the apartment.

These two books were promos for Tenerife; one was about the island and another about food and top restaurants. I’d never seen either before, but they were beautiful publications; creatively designed with stunning, sexy photographs. Both books were clearly expensive to publish and the text was in English, Spanish and German. However, on Tenerife there is almost always an ‘and yet’.

And yet, despite obviously pouring money and care into both books they hadn’t utilised TQM. I can’t read German, so I can’t speak for that, but the text in English was absolutely appalling and translated by someone who’s grasp of English wasn’t great. Here are a couple of examples:

‘The south of Tenerife has two water parks, Aqualand and Siam Park, where the Tenerife of our emotions can be wished up.’

‘The beauty of our shoreline is known in all.’

‘Alvaro has passed through projects of national projection.’

‘Support of the traditional cuisine artistically brought up to date.’

And finally this gem aimed at gay visitors.

‘It is based, in a cultivated way, on the same forms of treatment made equally to all our citizens.’

Answers about what any of the above mean on a postcard to…

I don’t mean to mock someone’s attempts at writing in another language. I know only too well how difficult that is. However, when you pay a lot of money to produce a high quality book aimed at visitors to your island, it would only have cost a fraction of the budget to pay someone who speaks English as a first language to translate the English text into something more digestible. Same with the German. It’s not as though it would be difficult to do that here.

To take that one little step would have demonstrated a grasp of Total Quality Management.

Because whoever was responsible for both book projects kept it in-house and didn’t utilise TQM they completely ruined what should have been two very high quality publications.

Can You Trust Tenerife Hotel Reviews on TripAdvisor?

Or any hotel reviews on TripAdvisor for that matter? Having spent the weekend at the Family Hotel Isabel in Costa Adeje I was interested to compare notes with reviews on TripAdvisor.

261 people had reviewed Family Hotel Isabel awarding it an overall 4 out of 5 stars rating. Nearly 80% rated it as being very good or excellent. But 10% felt that it was below average.

Curious about the disgruntled 10%, I decided to have a look at some recent poor reviews to see what made their experience of staying in Hotel Isabel so terrible.

Main Walkway at Hotel Isabel

The first came from British guests staying at the hotel this month.

‘Not alot of english at this hotel, def catered for the germans and spanish.’

Yes, it was definitely mostly Spanish guests when I was there, but then Tenerife is a part of Spain and the island receives a lot of mainland Spanish visitors during summer months.

There were a number of different nationalities at Hotel Isabel, it gave the place a cosmopolitan feel and I didn’t feel that it catered for any group in particular. I was treated exactly the same as everyone else. But maybe that was the problem for that reviewer.

The next poor review was from a Dutch visitor who gave Hotel Isabel 1 star saying:

‘The staff were incompetent and had no foreign language capabilities. The all inclusive food wasn’t edible.’

Ouch! I heard staff speaking Spanish, English and German; maybe all weren’t fluent in other languages but that’s not the same as having ‘no foreign language capabilities’. I witnessed friendly, helpful staff at all levels from managers to receptionists to chambermaids. I was especially impressed by the way the dining and kitchen staff kept a capacity dining room moving incredibly smoothly. As for inedible food –balderdash; buffets are never going to match à la carte meals but Hotel Isabel’s buffet was about as good as any 4* I’ve tried on my travels.

I could partly understand the next 2 star review as it came from guests forced to stay an extra night on Tenerife due to an air traffic controllers’ strike who had swapped the 5* Marylanza Spa for the Hotel Isabel. However, comparing a 5* with a 4* isn’t comparing like with like, especially when you don’t want to be there.  But the comment that caught my eye was this:

‘We gave up trying to get a cup of tea it was disgusting.’

There was a selection of loose teas at breakfast – but I can’t remember seeing teabags, so maybe that was the issue.

Main swimming pool at Hotel Isabel

Finally, there was this scathing 2 star review:

‘I would’nt the serve the food to my dogs. There was enough of it but very cheap quality food. If you like coco pops, watery orange juice beans and sweetcorn mixed with tomatoes and left over veg from the night before you will be ok.’

As a starter at the buffet I could have chosen from two tables of salads which included mussels, marinated fish, prawns and rice, pastas, crispy lettuces, a selection of olives, cheeses, beets, potato salad, chicken and sweetcorn etc, etc, etc. It all looked and tasted fresh.

For a main there was a choice of roasted chicken, trout, hake, lamb, pork fillets, papas arrugadas, chipped potatoes, scalloped potatoes, chips, lasagne, croquettes, pasta and sauces and a pizza corner with garlic bread.

And for dessert there was fresh fruit, pastries, cakes and ice creams (with bottles of rum and liqueurs to add that extra dash of sinfulness).

As buffets go, it was a damned decent one. But I suspect that sometimes when people strongly criticise food in hotels when the majority feel the opposite, it’s because they aren’t either familiar with or don’t like the food in front of them.

TripAdvisor is an extremely valuable source of information, but its greatest strength, first hand views and opinions from real people, can also be its weakness. People can be terribly subjective – if someone’s a fussy unadventurous eater that’s not a fault with a hotel. Neither is it a fault if a hotel isn’t full of people of the same nationality as the reviewer. To give it a bad review on a worldwide stage for either is unfair…worse it’s unhelpful to others.

For that reason I always treat negative reviews on TA with a degree of caution – It’s usually easy to spot the ones that are an outlet for personal preferences rather than valid observations. The other thing is that listening to the majority is usually a safer bet.

In this case 204 people out of 261 really, really liked the hotel. Make that 205.

Stepping Back into Tenerife’s Past: Tenerife Beaches and Resorts in 1969

I’ve just been thumbing through a little hard-backed tourist guidebook for Tenerife written back in 1969 when mass tourism was not so much in its infancy as barely having left the womb.

It’s a fascinating little book – unfortunately it’s in German and although I did study German for a while, I can only remember a smattering of words like der spinne and schizenhousen (actually it was my dad who taught me that one). Funnily enough I can remember more phrases from those little Commando books than I can from school lessons so if ever I need a ‘Gott im Himmel’ or ‘Achtung Englander’, I’m well prepared.

Anyway, the point is lots of the little gems within are lost to me, but names of places are in Spanish and there’s a little information section at the end which is in Spanish and English as well.

The photos are a real eye-opener to the way Tenerife has changed over the last 40 years…or not.

Tenerife's classiest town - looking almost exactly how it looked 40 years ago

There are some places – parts of the north west coast, La Orotava, Teide National Park – where the photos are exactly the same as ones I’ve taken in the last couple of years. However there are others where the differences are staggering. The La Orotava Valley for one, where much of the banana plantations in the lower valley have been engulfed by concrete – but Puerto de la Cruz had been an established port and was used to receiving visitors for centuries, so there was always a decent sized town on the coast.

The real contrast is on the south coast where there are as many small fishing boats on Los Cristianos beach as sunbathers and a handful of buildings at the back of the beach. El Médano is the same; Los Gigantes is almost non-existent and Las Américas not even a twinkle in developer’s eyes. Costa Adeje is a place that is way off in the future.

It was a very different Tenerife back then – just listen to this description of Bajamar.

‘…Bajamar which, after Puerto de la Cruz, can be considered the best equipped coastal resort for tourists.’

Now compare with the description of Los Cristianos.

‘This coastal village should become a resort of more extensive proportions because of its excellent climate…’

An almost identical photo to one in the 40 year-old book

Somebody clearly took that advice on board…and then some.

Interestingly Güímar is described as ‘the most important town in the southern part of the island.’ Which of course it always was and why the road south stopped there for centuries until the tiny southern hamlets were connected to civilisation by tarmac in the 1940s

Then there are the beaches on Tenerife, some of which don’t exactly match their current incarnations.

Playa Las Teresitas  – ‘It is 1450 metres long and the sand is dark in colour.’

Playa Los Cristianos – ‘The sand is light coloured. The road goes as far as the beach.’ The road goes as far as the beach; isn’t that great?

Playa Puerto Santiago - ‘…a length of 63 metres and dark sand; the road goes as far as the village, and then there is a path to the beach.’ Actually, thinking about the access to Playa Puerto Santiago today, it’s not that much different.

Finally the area of Las Américas/Costa Adeje gets a mention at last, except it’s not called Las  Américas.
Even then the beach was known as Playa de la Troya but getting to it was a bit different than nowadays – ’300 metres long with rocks; there is a road to the cliff-top and a path down to the beach.’

Fantastic isn’t it?

The British Guild of Travel Writers in Tenerife – Did They Find the Real Tenerife?

There was a moment on Thursday night at the gala dinner in honour of the British Guild of Travel Writers, visiting Tenerife for their AGM, when I suddenly felt like Alice through the looking glass.
The Disney-esque setting of the luxurious Gran Hotel Bahia del Duque combined with a laser show, which made feel as though I’d just tripped the hi-tech alarms in a heist movie, created a scene which was bordering on the surreal. I thought back to the previous Sunday when I was in San Antonio in La Matanza’s upper reaches for the San Abad celebrations.

Gran Hotel Bahia del Duque

Up there, sharing a bench with a pair of narky looking eagles and filling glasses from a carafe (a pepsi bottle) of sultry wine from the kiosk owner’s own vineyard seemed like the most natural thing in the world to be doing on a Sunday afternoon. That’s the Tenerife I know best. The plush, luxury hotel setting would be as alien to the people I had mingled with the previous Sunday as their world would be to most of the people who temporarily populate the tourist conurbations in the south of Tenerife.

But that didn’t make it any less real. It was simply a different face of Tenerife. In fact the gala dinner was a lively and enjoyable affair and Andy and I met some truly interesting people – no surprise there I suppose. If you’re passionate about travel and other cultures and you mingle with people who clearly share this passion, then their company is almost guaranteed to entertain.

The Tenerife Cabildo (government) had laid on a series of very diverse excursions to expose the BGTW members to the many different faces of the island and to try and drive home the message that Tenerife is much more than the tiny, purpose built area which grabs much of the attention…outside Tenerife that is.

Real Life in Tenerife's Hills

Pretty much all of the people I spoke to praised the organisation and the effort that had gone into showing them Tenerife. Although some trips had impressed more than others, most members seemed to have learned things about Tenerife that they hadn’t known previously.

I’m hoping that the learning process has been two way. In the short time I had to speak with various guild members it was obvious that their wealth of expertise and experience could help the Tenerife Tourism Board enormously. John Bell pinpointed marketing strategies which could revolutionise the way Tenerife is perceived in Britain. Sarah Monaghan’s knowledge about eco-tourism was a deep well which was there to be drawn from and Michael Howorth’s insight into the yachting fraternity’s view of marinas on Tenerife should have had tourism board officials scribbling furiously. I could go on and on.

If the powers that be on Tenerife are serious about the island modifying its media image so that it attracts more visitors who have an interest in the culture of the island rather than just its temperatures then they also have to adjust. They need to learn to listen more to and, more importantly, follow advice from external sources.

What impressions the BGTW will take away from their visit to Tenerife we’ll have to wait and see. Hopefully they will have been exposed to enough of the real Tenerife to convince them that Tenerife is full of, ironically given its annual amount of visitors, ‘undiscovered’ treasures.

However, my heart sank when I woke the morning after the gala dinner to read that after the dinner some journos had headed straight to the infamous Veronicas in Las Américas.

No prizes for guessing what they encountered there. I’m sure their visit was motivated by journalistic fascination, but just in case it wasn’t I’ll repeat what no doubt will be inscribed on my tombstone…

That is not a part of the real Tenerife; hell, it isn’t even representative of Las Américas these days.

The Magic of Tenerife – It’s Easy to Discover

It’s easy to view Tenerife in one dimensional terms, as little more than a purpose built tourist resort. That’s the way it’s presented both wittingly and unwittingly in a variety of mediums. However, all anyone needs to do to discover otherwise is to venture forth from their resorts. Just about every time I drive on Tenerife’s roads (the old ones, not the TF motorways) I see something which brings a smile to my face and reminds me how ‘different’ Tenerife actually is.

It isn’t just on Tenerife that you only discover the magic of the place by getting out and about, and it isn’t just Tenerife that has holidaymakers who rarely leave their resort.

The first time we went to Sri Lanka the civil war between the Tamils and the Sinhalese Army had flared up. On arrival at our hotel we were given a F.O. memo advising us not to leave the hotel’s grounds. One woman broke down in tears, she had no idea that the country was in the grip of a civil war.

Anyhow, we’d been following the situation for some time and had spoken to the Sri Lankan Embassy in London and knew that it was only certain areas which were badly affected and we weren’t in one of them. So, as soon as we recovered from jet lag, we walked out of the hotel and went on a voyage of discovery into a land where very little seemed familiar. One of the many things which really gave us a buzz was the sight of giant monitor lizards lumbering along in the ditches and pools at the side of the road, some as big as crocodiles. They were everywhere.

The reason I mention this is that later in our holiday we went on a coach excursion. At one point the coach stopped and a local man stood at the window holding up one of these ancient looking monitor lizards in his hands. Nearly everyone in that coach jumped up from their seats and ran out to take photos of the big lizard, for which the man charged a small fee.

It was a stupid thing for the visitors to do for a couple of reasons.

1. It would encourage more men to catch monitors to earn ‘easy money’ from the tourists, not a particularly pleasant development for the lizards.
2. If they’d only stepped outside of their hotels they would have seen dozens of the damn things where they should be, in the wild.

That’s only one little example, but I could apply the same sort of thing over and over again to everywhere we’ve visited in the world, Tenerife included.

The Sea of Clouds Hugs the Mountain Slopes

On Saturday we sat on the edge of an abyssal ravine looking down on Costa Adeje. It was a spot of sobering contrasts. Above us loomed a cliff face 7 million years in the making and below us a resort which was younger than I am by some distance. Sitting on those gnarled rocks it felt as though I was looking into the future from the past. It was odd to experience such contrasting sides of the island in one vista.
Later, as we drove through the hills, we passed a gathering of hunters and their families holding a party in a small churchyard beside a statue of Hermano Pedro, the Canary Island’s one and only home grown Saint. As we left the pine forest above Vilaflor, a blindingly white sea of clouds hugged every nook and cranny in the undulating slopes; it was spectacular. Crossing the Teide Crater, the low evening sun made the landscape so sharp that I fancied it was clear enough to see a lizard scuttling on Mount Teide’s summit which was framed by an impossibly intense deep blue sky. Descending from Aguamansa we became caught in a traffic queue caused by a troop of caballeros (horse riders) who wouldn’t have looked out of place in Brokeback Mountain (not that I’m suggesting they were gay).

Mount Teide, Sharp as a Pin in the early Evening Sunlight

They were all little things, little magical things which were unique to the real Tenerife and which would never be seen from the inside of a hotel complex.

Is it the End for Playa de las Américas?

You’ve heard it here first, within a few years, maybe sooner, the resort of Playa de las Américas on Tenerife will simply cease to exist.
This news will come as a terrible shock to those millions of Brits who return year after year to enjoy its promise of almost guaranteed sun warming its man-made golden beaches and its lively bars and tribute act heaven nightlife.

For those who consider themselves travellers rather than tourists and for whom the mere mention of those four words Playa-de-la-Américas elicits the same reaction as if they’d just been served a montadito topped with a fresh dog turd, the news is unlikely to ruin their day.

‘So how come I haven’t heard anything about this before?’ I hear you ask. That’s because nobody is admitting it, but it doesn’t take a Robert Langdon to spot the writing on the wall.

Playa de Troya - Once in Las Americas...but no longer

First it was the rise of Costa Adeje; a few years ago an ambitious young upstart hanging on to PDLA’s wild and reckless shirt tails. But now it has spread its wings, reclaiming parts of the coastline which everyone who holidayed there once knew affectionately, or otherwise, as PDLA.

The invasion has spread as far as the two beaches which are officially still called Playa de las Américas I and Playa de las Américas II, now renamed Playa de Troya I and II lest anyone should think for a second that, god forbid, they are actually in Playa de las Américas.

This little manouvre has worked well with potential visitors who would never dream of staying in such a ‘downmarket’ resort as PDLA, but it’s confused the hell out of those who have happily been holidaying in PDLA for years. I’ve seen outraged debates from some visitors who love their holidays in PDLA, but now find themselves holidaying against their will in Costa Adeje, even though they haven’t actually changed location.

...and if this is no longer PDLA, where the hell is?

Technically there’s a valid reason for this; the area which has metamorphised from PDLA into Costa Adeje always was in the municipality of Adeje. Rightly, or wrongly, Costa Adeje has more of an up market image than its neighbour, so from a marketing point, it works in its favour to ‘rebrand’ and I’ve watched with amusement as PDLA has continued to ‘shrink’ over the last couple of years.

What took me completely by surprise was finding out that the Hotel Conquistador, which I always believed to be in the heart of PDLA is in fact in Los Cristianos. It must be true, I’ve just read it in the Arona Ayuntamiento website.

What this clearly means is that PDLA is now shrinking from both sides and soon will be no more than a fond, and possibly blurred, memory for the millions who visited over the years.

At the moment, by my calculations, PDLA now consists of three rocks on the beach in front of a rather tacky souvenir shop selling ‘Keep PDLA Common as Muck’ T-shirts and one Brit bar where they you can get a pint of beer and a roast beef and yorkshire pud meal with all the trimmings for €1.50.

Everywhere else, of course, has gone way, way upmarket.

Confused? Join the club.

Does anybody actually know anything about Tenerife?

To keep up to date with what’s happening on Tenerife you have to be out and about pretty much constantly. A couple of times a month we head ‘down south’ and this week we travelled to Playa de las Américas (PDLA) and Costa Adeje.

The trip to Playa de las Américas was mainly to research an article we’re writing and to take some photographs; the trip to Costa Adeje was to meet up with some friends, Irene and Dennis, who were on holiday in Tenerife.

The perfect beach...not a grain of sand out of place

I find PDLA one of the most difficult places to photograph on Tenerife. As much of it was built in the 70s, the architecture (apart from a couple of the newer hotels) isn’t particularly inspiring. There are no grand old mansions, quaint cobbled streets or charming harbours; the beaches are immaculate, but that’s part of the problem. Sun beds and palm covered umbrellas lie in neat rows…it’s too regimented.

I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with it. PDLA is looking clean and pristine and for many visitors it supplies exactly what they want from a holiday; it’s just that for me, apart from the coastline where the surfers hang out, it lacks character.

The coastal promenade, known as the geranium walk, is a pleasant way to see the resort, but at certain points there are packs of lurking timeshare touts waiting to prey on unsuspecting tourists like starving hyenas.

I don’t have a problem with timeshare touts, they’re friendly enough and everybody’s got to make a living, but it becomes tiring hearing ‘Hi mate, avin’ a good holiday?’ ‘Are you English?’ and the likes over and over again.

We were ignored by most; being dressed in long sleeved tops and trousers when everyone else was in shorts and T-shirts, the sun was shining and it was 22 degrees must have been a bit of a clue that we weren’t on holiday. Some didn’t pick up on that and we were stopped a couple of times with a ‘Hi, enjoying your holiday? Where are you guys staying?’

“We’re not on holiday, we live here,” I replied on both occasions.

Of course, they never believe that one, so their counter to this was a suspicious.

“Yeah, whereabouts do you live?” Clearly expecting that my face would turn red, I’d start stammering and then I’d admit I was lying.

“In Puerto,” I answered and in both instances the reaction to this was exactly the same.

“Where?”

One of them even asked if it was on the mainland. Both touts had been on the island a few years, but their knowledge of it outside of the place they worked and lived was virtually non-existent.

The second discourse happened as we were on our way to meet our friends and all the way to their hotel I chuntered on to Andy about how it never ceased to amaze me how many expats living in Tenerife didn’t seem to have much of a clue about the island at all.

We had a lovely time catching up with our friends and time sped by so quickly that we were caught by surprise when a young Canarian friend of theirs, who hails from Santa Cruz and who lived with our friends for a while in the UK, turned up to have dinner with them.

The woman with the big boobies

Irene introduced us and told us that earlier in the week he’d shown them around Santa Cruz and had taken them to see his favourite female, ‘the woman with the big boobies’ in a lovely park in the capital.

“Ah, Fecundidad,” Andy commented.

“What?” he replied.

“Fecundidad…” Andy repeated and then switched to English when he shrugged his shoulders. “…Fertility…in Parque García Sanabria.”

He shrugged again.

Our conversation about the island went from bad to worse as Dennis and Irene’s friend became more embarrassed when he couldn’t identify a picture of a flower on a postcard which Dennis asked him about (it was a strelitzia – the bird of paradise). As I watched him laugh nervously as Andy jokingly chided him for not knowing the island’s most famous flower, previous conversations with two Canarian friends popped into my head.

When we first started to research info about Tenerife, we used to ask them about phrases, or words which we were unable to translate. Their replies were invariably the same.

“I think I was ill the day they taught that at school,” one would reply.

“It was probably a sunny day when they taught that, I’d have gone swimming,” the other would offer as an excuse.

I realised then that it was unfair to level a lack of knowledge of the island at anyone irrespective of whether they were born here or moved here.

It’s our job to know as much as we can about Tenerife for Real Tenerife, Going Native in Tenerife and Living Tenerife. However, when I lived in Stockport  if you’d asked me a question about the town, the chances are I’d have given the same response as the lad from Santa Cruz; shrugged my shoulders.

On the other hand, living on Tenerife and not having heard of Puerto is an offence which is difficult to defend.