Hookers, whores, prostitutes, tarts .. Or sex workers, so it seems an acceptable "employment service" to contract and, clearly, there are plenty of er, "gentlemen" wishing to do so. One such visitor from Finland used Google to search for "tenerife prostitute price" and the unfortunate fellow ended up here. So, always aiming to, ahem ... give satisfaction (though I emphasize that my own street walking adventures in Tenerife are of the purely non-prostitute kind), I thought I would carry out a little research into this, erm, niche of the service sector.
Of course, the world's oldest profession is nothing new, even on this island.
Tenerife manages to get a mention in this book, The Floating Brothel: The Extraordinary True Story of an Eighteenth-Century Ship and Its Cargo of Female Convicts by Sian Rees, set in the 1780's and sub-titled "The Extraordinary True Story of an Eighteenth-Century Ship and its Cargo of Female Convicts". And the female convicts antics are compared to the notorious dock-women of Tenerife (presumably driven to prostitution through poverty) in The Fatal Shore: History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787-1868, which contains the following passage:
"Since the liaisons were free of legal ties, a settler could simply throw a convict woman out when he was tired of her. This caused a troublesome floating population of whores and unattached "disorderly women" to accumulate around Sydney Cove, whose westerly arm, "The Rocks," soon acquired a well-deserved name as the rowdiest and most dangerous thieves' kitchen in the colony. As early as 1793, these women were offending all who met them, including a Spanish lieutenant who stopped in Sydney on an exploration vessel, the Atrevida: They made "continuous seductive advances" to his crewmen, slipped them Mickey Finns, robbed them blind, and were so "degraded by vice, or rather greed" that the notorious dock-women of Tenerife paled in memory beside them."Mostly British, French and German travellers chronicles from the 18th and 19th Centuries also reveal the invisible History of Canary Islands Women, in which,
"Some travellers also spoke of how misery drove many island women to prostitute themselves in exchange for a few coins, mainly those who did not have a man to look after them. And there are stories of how women offered themselves to sailors or a group of thirty girls, accompanied by their old mothers, who begged insistently for "the favour of an intimate conversation"."The history of prostitution in Tenerife gets even darker when linked to politics and cult religion with "the ancient practice of religious prostitution" and the story descends even further into the murky depths when the Tenerife-born sex cult "messiah" turned killer. A fictional link to the sex trade in Christophe Honore's film Ma Mère, although critics said the Hooker's Oedipal romp was boring.
Getting finally down to business, the World Sex Guide had quote priced for these services in Tenerife, in pesetas, from 2000. Undoubtedly, these will have risen (no pun intended) since then, as they seem to in everything. Back then, the price for a 5' 10", blonde, "porn star quality" prostitute in Playa de Las Americas in Tenerife, apparently, oscillated around 30,000 Pts per hour. That equates to 180.00 Euros in today's money, which was roughly £120.00 sterling or US $220 in 2006.
World Sex Guide also informed us that "The word "whiskeria" is often used for brothel and that "Barra americana" (American bar) are bars where you can find girls. They said that the best was the "Bar de la Rosa" at the highway exit shortly after the Tenerife South Airport northbound in direction Santa Cruz de Tenerife. They didn't say when or for what, but paid 15.000 ptas (90 Euros/£60).
Nightclub The Matrix Club offers a variety of euphemistically named relaxation and escort services of varying levels of luxury and exclusiveness.
Out on the street, there are bargains to be found, although one man "blew his top at the €20 price charged by a prostitute for oral sex and tried to denounce her for over-charging", said The Western Sun Newspaper, under the headline of "Blow me! That's a bit steep!" They went on to say that, "The 48-year-old Spaniard was still complaining about the rising cost of loving as he was arrested and charged with drunk driving", after he arrived at the police station in Santa Cruz in his car, with the prostitute still in the passenger seat.
Today, around 80 percent of prostitutes working in Spain are immigrants from Latin America, Eastern Europe and Africa. There is little doubt that many of the foreign prostitutes have been coerced into the trade by criminals who lured them to Spain with false promises of other jobs, as reported on numerous occasions with the headline 'Europe's brothel' - referring to Tenerife.
Certainly, there isn't and never has been, a shortage of prostitutes in Tenerife.