Editorial · Summer 2026

Every time the plane lands in Tenerife, I feel the same thing.

For a few moments, before the doors open and people begin reaching for their bags, I feel as though I have arrived somewhere I never truly left.

Then I step outside.

The air is different. Warm and faintly salty, carried in from the Atlantic, with Africa so close that it seems present in the light and the heat. After hours in the air and months spent imagining the return, that first breath brings back an emotion I still find difficult to explain.

Sometimes I want to stop right there on the runway. To lie down beneath the island sky for a few seconds and simply be grateful that I am back.

I do not, of course.

I keep walking with the other passengers, towards the terminal, the luggage and the road south. Yet for a moment I remain suspended between arrival and return, when Tenerife is not yet a holiday or even a destination.

It is simply a feeling. For me, the island's story began with that feeling and, slowly, it changed my plans.

A place that never tries to persuade you

My first encounter with Tenerife was not a cinematic revelation.

I did not look at the ocean and immediately know that the island would become important to me. I certainly did not imagine that one day I would own a place here.

At first, Tenerife was what it is for most people: a few days of sunshine, ocean, palm trees and enough distance from ordinary life.

But the island has a quiet way of drawing closer.

It does not win you over with a single view, nor does it try to prove anything. It lets you discover it through details that can seem almost insignificant:

With every return, I began to notice more.

Tenerife was not only the mild climate people seek in winter, nor the familiar image of an island holiday.

It was an island of contrasts: ocean and lava, crowded towns and villages held between cliffs, bright promenades and roads disappearing into cloud, modern hotels and markets where fruit, voices and scents preserve the rhythm of local life.

The island's charm lies not only in what it shows you.

It lies in what it teaches you to notice.

A different rhythm

In everyday life, time is often divided into things that must be done, solved and ticked off.

In Tenerife, that pressure begins to fade.

A morning can begin with a walk that has no exact destination. You can head down towards the ocean without wondering what comes next. You can spend several minutes looking at the water, even though nothing remarkable is happening.

Here I rediscovered the pleasure of not turning every moment into a result.

In the morning, the promenade belongs to runners, families out for a walk and people drinking coffee while looking towards the sea. Some have come for a few days. Others have returned for years. A few have chosen to stay.

Over time, I stopped seeing Tenerife as scenery.

I began to see it as a way of paying closer attention: to the light, to the ocean and to the things I might have passed in a hurry elsewhere.

Los Cristianos and the feeling of returning

I have explored several parts of the island.

Costa Adeje can be elegant and refined. Playa de las Américas has energy and a life that continues long after sunset. Santa Cruz moves with the rhythm of a real city, while the north reveals a greener, cooler and sometimes more mysterious Tenerife.

Yet Los Cristianos remained the place where I found the balance I had been looking for.

It is not perfect. It does not need to be.

It is a living town, with a harbour, beaches, restaurants, shops, busy streets and quiet corners. A place you can visit for a few days and still imagine returning to again and again.

In the morning, the town belongs to those who wake early. The tables are still empty, the promenade seems to breathe and the ocean feels closer.

In the evening, restaurant lights come on and people make their way towards the water once more. Sometimes the sky remains clear. On other evenings the clouds ignite in red, violet and orange, and the whole town appears to pause for several minutes.

I photographed many of those evenings.

Not because I wanted to collect pictures, but because I did not want to forget.

Later I understood that a photograph preserves more than a place. It also preserves the person I was at that moment: the way I looked at the world, what I hoped for and everything I had yet to learn.

That is why certain images become more valuable with time. Not because they are perfect, but because they open a door to an earlier version of ourselves.

Beyond the postcard

It would be easy to write about Tenerife only through ocean views, beaches and sunsets.

But the island does not live only in spectacular images.

It also lives in markets, in the voices of traders, in fruit you are seeing for the first time and in the bustle of an ordinary morning.

In Santa Cruz, at Mercado de Nuestra Señora de África — La Recova — I discovered one of these other faces of the island.

The building, with its tower and arches, invites you inside. Yet the real story begins within.

The stalls are full of colour. People ask questions, choose and talk. There is none of the silence of a sunset or the open space of the ocean. There is movement, scent, gesture and life.

Here, Tenerife is no longer a destination prepared for visitors.

It is the place where people live their ordinary days.

A place begins to matter in a deeper way when you want to know it beyond what a guidebook chooses to show you.

When a holiday becomes a decision

I did not buy the property on impulse.

Behind the decision were months of research, calculations, comparisons and questions. I studied areas, prices, costs and risks. I tried to separate the excitement of a holiday from the reality of a long-term commitment.

It is one thing to love a place for a few days.

It is another to connect part of your future to it.

At a certain point, however, numbers cannot decide everything.

You can compare properties until they all begin to resemble one another. You can study the market and build endless scenarios. But there is one question no spreadsheet can answer:

Would I still want to return here if there were no bookings at all?

For me, the answer was yes.

I was not only buying an apartment.

I was buying future time. Mornings that had not happened yet.

Coffees still undrunk. Sunsets I had not seen. Memories that did not yet exist.

Looking back, I believe this was the true investment: the possibility of returning.

After you receive the keys

Many people imagine that buying a property ends on the day the keys are handed over.

For me, that was when the most difficult part began.

The apartment had to be prepared not only to look good in photographs, but to be lived in. I chose the furniture, the equipment and all the seemingly small details that, together, change how a stay is experienced.

I did not want a space created for perfect images and disappointing in reality.

I wanted a place where I would be happy to stay myself.

I remember the quiet inside the apartment after I received the keys. A few papers were still lying on the table, and from outside came the faint sound of water in the pool. Nothing remarkable was happening.

And that was precisely when I understood that it was no longer only a property I had once seen in a listing.

It had become my place.

I learned that hospitality is not simply about offering a key and a bed. It means looking at the space through the eyes of someone who has just travelled for hours and wants, before anything else, to feel at ease.

A property can be bought in a day, but the feeling of home is built slowly.

Through attention. Through patience. Through the way you choose to care.

A window into a story

I did not buy the apartment for a quick return.

I bought it as a long-term investment, in a place I trust and where I enjoy returning.

But it would be incomplete to reduce everything to that explanation.

A property has financial value.

A place can acquire personal meaning.

For me, Port Royale 285 became the point from which I look out towards the island. Not its centre, and not the only reason I return.

It is the beginning — a window into a story.

Through that window I see Los Cristianos in the morning, the evening light and an ocean that never seems to have exactly the same colour.

But I also see the roads leading towards Santa Cruz, Teide, the north of the island and villages where the mountains seem to close around the houses.

Towards places I do not yet know and stories I have not yet written.

The island you never finish discovering

Masca is one of the places that breaks apart the simplified image of a tropical island.

There, Tenerife becomes vertical.

The cliffs rise sharply, the roads twist and the houses seem to occupy a landscape where geography should never have allowed life.

The light falls differently. The shadows are deeper. The ocean feels distant, although it is always present.

In front of a landscape like this, you understand that Tenerife is not a place to tick off a list.

You do not finish it in a week; you discover it in fragments, through different seasons and different states of mind.

That is why Tenerife Guide will not become a collection of lists telling people what they “must” see in three, five or seven days.

I want to preserve room for curiosity, unplanned roads and the moments that never appear on an itinerary but become the most important part of a journey.

How Tenerife Guide began

The idea for this project was not born in a meeting or from a business plan.

It took shape gradually, through photographs, questions and the desire to preserve what I was living.

I noticed how often information about Tenerife appeared in the same forms: lists, rankings, descriptions without a voice and images without a story.

Tenerife Guide will not try to become the largest website about the island.

We may publish only five articles in a year, but every one of them must deserve to exist.

Each piece will begin with a place I have visited, an experience I have lived or a question for which I have searched for an honest answer.

The photographs will be original.

The recommendations will be sincere.

And when a place is not perfect, we will not pretend that it is.

We are not writing only for the reader who opens this page today.

We are also writing for the person who may discover it twenty years from now.

They may not know who I was. The island may have changed. Yet I hope these words will let them feel the warm air as they step off the plane.

I hope they will see the light falling across the white houses.

I hope they will hear the ocean, if only in their imagination.

And understand why one person returned to an island until that island became part of his life.

Our promise

This is the first editorial.

In time, perhaps there will be dozens of articles, thousands of photographs and stories from places we do not yet know.

The essence, however, must remain unchanged.

We will never publish a text that is not worthy of Tenerife Guide.

We will not turn experience into advertising, and we will not sacrifice truth for a more beautiful image.

We will try not only to show where a place is.

We will preserve something of how it feels.

When I look across Tenerife from above, over white rooftops and an ocean disappearing into light, I think of all the things that began before I realised they had begun.

A holiday became a return. A return became a decision. A decision became a place. And that place became a story.

For me, a part remained in Tenerife.

Tenerife Guide is my way of opening that window for others.