I’ve just completed a trawl of the Tenerife council websites to find out what interesting things are happening over the Xmas period so that we can let people know for our Tenerife Matters blog.
And I have to say that by the time I was finished I felt like banging my head against the wall. We all know that there’s a communications revolution taking place in the big wide world. In the last couple of years the use of social media on the internet has completely changed the way businesses and organisations promote themselves… unless they happen to be on Tenerife.
In two years the way we use the web has changed almost beyond recognition, but some Ayuntamientos (Town Councils) on Tenerife have not only missed the train, they haven’t reached the station yet – they obviously don’t know where the station is, in fact I’m not sure that they know that there even is a station.
The councils which didn’t have websites a couple of years ago still don’t have websites. Those which had had websites as primitive as Guanche drawings on a cave wall, still have primitive websites. There are a couple of councils which had quite decent websites who have changed them – and now they’re worse (Icod de los Vinos, I’m pointing the finger at you here).
To be fair there are towns which do have decent and informative websites, interestingly these are the towns which were historically always the most advanced (La Laguna, La Orotava). But some of the municipalities which attract a lot of tourists have appalling websites (San Miguel and Granadilla) and these, historically let’s say, were not the most advanced and clearly still aren’t.
And then there’s dear old Puerto de la Cruz which for the first few years we lived here didn’t have a website, then did have one during the last couple of years and now doesn’t seem to have one again (nice to see the new council members are ‘getting things moving’).
Christmas is almost upon us and Tenerife’s first tourist town doesn’t have a website to inform visitors of all the wonderful things which are taking place. How smart is that?
This lack of internet savvy might seem quaint and charming at first and part of the Island’s little quirks, but when the bulk of your main GDP comes from tourism and people who live beyond Tenerife’s warm and sunny coastline, it could also be seen to be unbelievably stupid.
However, if you are unwilling to listen to advice from outside of the family circle, what do you expect? I’ll tell you what you get, though.
Boom and bust, boom and bust, boom and…
Living beneath the volcano 