Visited: 24 October 2026, on a call of MS Amadea.
Yes, you can spend a port day in the pine forest instead of in the city. Las Raíces lies at around 1,000 metres in the municipality of El Rosario, 40 to 50 minutes from the pier by coach. The waymarked loop, PR-TF 25.1, is 5.35 km with 329 metres of climbing and takes about two hours. Door to door, allow four. The one hard part is transport, not the walking.
Where does the ship dock in Santa Cruz de Tenerife?
Santa Cruz is an alongside berth, not a tender port. Ships tie up on the city side of the harbour and the walk into town is flat: roughly 15 to 20 minutes, about a mile, to Plaza de España, with a port shuttle running when several ships are in. None of that helps with Las Raíces. The forest sits a kilometre above the quay in a straight vertical line, and no bus runs from the port to it. That is the whole problem of this excursion, and the reason most people book the ship’s coach.
Where is Las Raíces, and how do you get there?
Las Raíces is in the Monte de La Esperanza, on the southern flank of the ridge that climbs from La Laguna towards the Teide. By road it is the TF-24 to kilometre 8.8, then the TF-274, then a turning at kilometre 0.8. Our coach took the motorway out of Santa Cruz, climbed through La Laguna and the village of La Esperanza, and reached the recreational area in 40 to 50 minutes. The road gains about a thousand metres on the way, which you feel as soon as the doors open.
I rode the same climb on another day, by bicycle: 51 kilometres there and back, 1,320 metres of ascent, two hours and 36 minutes of riding. That is the honest measure of what lies between the pier and the trailhead.
Independently, it is a taxi or a hire car. TITSA buses do serve La Esperanza from the Intercambiador in Santa Cruz, but the recreational area is a further climb beyond the village and the timetable is not built around a ship’s day. Arrange the transport and the rest is easy: the loop is signposted, and you do not need a guide to walk it.
Walking the PR-TF 25.1 loop
The numbers, as the Cabildo publishes them: 5.35 kilometres, about two hours, 329 metres up and the same down, between 933 and 1,055 metres above sea level, graded medium. It starts and ends at the Zona Recreativa Las Raíces, where there is parking, there are tables and fire pits, toilets open during ranger hours, and a water tap that is not for drinking. The route heads towards Montaña Chica, crosses the Barranco Maravedís, climbs a flight of wooden steps at Bedijo and comes back round. Loose stone, uneven ground, steep edges above the ravines; it is not a route for anyone with reduced mobility.
Finding the way is straightforward. Wooden posts carry the trail number and the distances — 5 km for the Circular Las Raíces, 1.5 km to the campsite — and the Canary footpath network marks the turns with yellow-and-white flashes painted on rock.
What the walk is actually like depends entirely on the cloud. We were inside it for most of the morning: visibility thirty or forty metres, trunks appearing and dissolving, the ground a deep rust-red carpet of needles that gives underfoot like a running track. On a clear day the trees thin towards Montaña Chica and the Güímar valley opens below. We did not get that day, and it did not matter.
Why this forest exists at all
The Canary pine has three needles to a sheath — never two, never four — and they grow 20 to 30 centimetres long. That is not botanical trivia here. The needles comb water out of the trade-wind cloud, and the fog drip collected under the trees can reach twenty times the rainfall measured in the open ground beside them. Islanders call it horizontal rain. Our guide put the cloud layer at roughly 600 metres at its base and 1,600 at its top, which is exactly the band the forest occupies.
The water is the point of the whole landscape. Tenerife has no lake and no river, only barrancos that run after rain. What falls sinks into porous volcanic rock, and the island went after it sideways: the Cabildo’s 2015 census counted 1,122 galerías and 398 wells, some 1,700 kilometres of tunnel in total, of which 41 per cent were still producing. The galerías are horizontal shafts, roughly 1.8 metres square, driven kilometres into the massif from the outside in.
That also explains why the trees stand so close together. This is a replanted forest, and according to our guide the planting method — seedlings set deep with a cane on slopes too steep to hold them otherwise — came from an engineer named Orduño. They were planted tight on purpose: more needles, more water. Not timber. The older island pine forest, the one cleared from the sixteenth century onwards for sugar-boiling firewood, ships’ pitch and house beams, stood as scattered thick trunks instead. The dense, slender stand you walk through today is a water installation that happens to look like a wood.
One small thing worth knowing if you see people with rakes: collecting the fallen needles is a permitted and regulated job. Too deep a layer makes a fire run; a layer has to be left behind as humus. What is taken goes into animal stalls as bedding and comes back out as compost for the banana and tomato fields.
What the 2023 fire left behind
The fire started on 15 August 2023 and the Cabildo did not declare it out until 10 November. Around 15,000 hectares burned across twelve municipalities; El Rosario, which Las Raíces belongs to, accounts for about 13 per cent of the burned area. Arson is the suspected cause. The recreational area and campsite reopened at the end of September 2023, while the fire was still officially alive.
Three years on the forest reads in two layers, and once you see it you cannot unsee it. The trunks are black to head height. The crowns above them are green. The Canary pine is one of very few pines that can resprout epicormically — new shoots pushing straight out of a burnt trunk — which is why a scorched stand here is not a dead stand. Our guide put it more briefly: it goes black, and in two years it is green again.
What is left at eye level is the better subject anyway: bark peeling off in charred plates, grass taking the open slopes where the canopy went, puddles of orange water standing on the burnt earth, and in one place a spider web strung between a dead branch and a trunk burnt down to the resin.
The other history of Las Raíces
The clearing is quieter than its past. On 17 June 1936 the senior officers of the Canaries met here with Francisco Franco, then military commander of the islands, to prepare the coup that began the Civil War a month later. A pillar marking the meeting was put up in October 1958; the Cabildo had it demolished in 2015 under Spain’s historical memory law. Nothing explains any of this on site, which is part of why it is worth knowing before you go. The wood itself was listed as a conjunto histórico in 1964.
Tour or on your own?
The ship’s coach solves the only difficult part of the day and adds a guide who knows which tree is doing what. The walking needs no guide at all: the loop is waymarked, two hours long, and the recreational area is an obvious start and finish.
So the decision comes down to one comparison — the price your line charges against a return taxi fare for roughly 25 kilometres and a thousand metres of climbing each way, split between however many of you are going. Ask at the port taxi rank before you decide, and agree the return pick-up time in advance; there is no passing trade at the trailhead to flag down afterwards. Whichever way you go, be back at the pier 45 to 60 minutes before all-aboard. The TF-24 is a mountain road, and cloud on it slows everything down.
Photographs and light
Everything I brought back from this walk was made inside the cloud, and that is the recommendation. Fog does the work a wide landscape here will not: it separates the trunks into planes, kills the contrast that makes a pine wood unreadable at midday, and turns the red needle floor into the only colour in the frame. Shoot the near things — water beading on needles, waymarks on wet rock, charcoal bark against new grass. The long view over Güímar is the one shot the weather may simply refuse you, and it is the least interesting of them.
Practical notes
Shoes with grip — the needle layer slides on hard ground and the burnt slopes are loose. A layer more than you would wear in Santa Cruz: at a thousand metres in cloud it is appreciably cooler than at the quay. Carry your own water, because the tap at the recreational area is not drinkable. Open fires are restricted, and were banned outright across the burnt municipalities after 2023, so the fire pits are not an invitation.
If your driver comes back down through El Rosario, the Mercadillo Agrícola is on the way: a small farmers’ market, island potatoes and vegetables, no souvenirs, and worth ten minutes.
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