Tenerife Landscaping and Nature Viewing: Part 3
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| Photo: Mine |
This is a finishing up of our last trip through Tenerife this past February. Heading out from Peurta de La Cruz we started in San Cristobal de La Laguna where my wife wanted to see some tourist places. Interesting looking colonial type town, but extremely narrow streets, often one way direction and an almost impossible maze to try and get out of. So we left this city and made it to the ridgeline highway called TF-12 which rides the ridgeline backbone of the mountains heading through the remote area known for it's lush looking Laurel Forests with almost rainforest vegetation on the left side facing north and drier desert type vegetation on the right which was south facing. The road eventually circled around back to Santa Cruz de Tenerfie, which is the capitol of this island, then back to the hotel in Puerta de La Cruz.
The one striking feature that you can say about the buildings of Tenerife is the various striking bright colours found everywhere. A definite relief from the dull unimaginative of typical modern Scandinavian architecture back where we live.
Many of the areas driving along the north side of Hwy TF-12 seem to have a high tropical mountain temperate look about them as if in some northern South American country like Columbia, but minus all the chaos, crime and poverty so prevalent in those areas of the hispanic world. The south side by contrast has less vegetation, yet different type of vegetation as well, winding all the way down to the sea coast behind Santa Cruz. Notice many of the steep mountainside properties need a large amount of terracing if anything usable is to be done with the land. Finally at the bottom at the southern coastline the variety of colours throughout the town.
From this point we headed back and took some tour of the various neighbourhoods around our hotel to view the Spanish style homes and appartments and the type of landscaping they do to accent those buildings. Many people grow many common fruit trees like Papaya, Mango, Bananas, etc which also have a ornamental value besides the obvious food reasons for incorporating them into the yard.
Well basically this is a further view of what we enjoyed and experienced down there in the Canaries, but more colour to come on my next Bougainvillea trek in Tenerife and Gran Canaria. Bougainvillea is one of those interesting plants that doesn't necessarily need any company as it tends to make bold statements all by itself.
Just got back from Helsinki Finland today after being gone for a week. Weather this spring in Scandinavia has been wet and cold, well 50 F. That's cold for me. I'll be taking more pics of the forests here this summer and sharing some of what is left of any healthy pockets of any old growth and also several takes on the industrial forestry which is pretty much the failed Socialistic standard fare for custodialship of nature here and will compare the two. However, it's nice to escape the failing E.U. once in a while.
Enjoy!
Hello there! Tenerife is a lot like Cape Verde except we had LESS rain. Talk about drab landscape....and a gardner's nightmare. We rationed our water every week very carefully. Who knew when the water would be turned on to fill up our tanks!!! But a lot of Arizona trees have been used on these arid islands and they were planted after the locals had devastated much of their own vegetation....and then lose precious soil to the ocean from runoff! Ugh. But I did like that they used terraces to keep as much of that rain water as possible. I've always wanted to go to the Canary Islands. It's nice to see the pictures and read your personal account. It's a tad greener than CV but not by much:)
ReplyDeleteI'm actually more and more curious as to why they chose Arizona plants over what was left there and plants selected from the African Continent itself. Maybe I'll Google it and see if I can find something.
DeleteYes it intrigued me as to the huge amount of effort that those Canary Islnad people did in terracing everywhere , even if they were not proposing to plant anything there. Slowing down water flow and allowing perculation was the only thing that came to mind, but then in habitat restoration that's exactly all I think about anyway.
Hmmmmmmmmm, maybe ancient aliens told them to do this for some un-known scientific reasons only the aliens knew? I can't believe alot of the supposed scientific programming subject matter shown over here that is passed of as real science like the multi-part series dealing with ancient aliens from the past influencing mankind and still wanting to help us now. *sigh*
Interesting tour of a place I might never visit. I could live with the architecture and land in Tenerife, but could only visit what you describe from Scandanavia!
ReplyDeleteYeah, this is one of the few places on the planet where I ever felt like it could be home. Scandinavia has never really felt like home to me, other than I like all of my friends there. Maybe I should take some snapshots of the Soviet Styled housing Projects here along with un-eventful un-imaginative, lack of artistic creativity landscping demonstrated here and give you an idea of what I'm talking about.
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