Tenerife Fire the evacuation and aftermath

The wonderful home of the Hospital Veterinario Tenerife Norte

As I'm writing this, there are helicopters circling over the Teno mountains every few minutes, so we imagine that the fire must have reactivated again nearby. You may have deduced from the international media reports (most of which bear little resemblance to the truth) and my absence, that I was one of the thousands in Tenerife who were evacuated because of the forest fires. And here I will make a couple of public personal thanks, first to Jack and Andrea Montgomery of Real Tenerife Island Drives, who kindly put this "refugee" up in their own home. 

Secondly, if you should ever find yourself in need of temporary hotel accommodation for your animals in Tenerife (dogs, cats, parrots, iguanas, tortoises, rabbits and more), I thoroughly recommend the Hospital Veterinario Tenerife Norte, who looked after my "furry tribe" for the night. The service I received, even on such short notice, and their handling of me, under these very stressful circumstances, was reassuring and marvellous.

Evacuation: We were woken up here in the higher part of the El Palmar valley; Las Portelas and Las Lagunetas at 5 a.m. on Tuesday morning, when the Civil Guard were going door-to-door telling people to leave.

The sky above the mountains at the head of the valley was vivid red against the darkness and the fire looked to be in danger of coming in this direction.

The larger risk was the smoke, which was getting quite strong already while we were all outside damping down houses and surrounding plants and trees in an attempt to make them less flammable. Fortunately, the wind changed and took the fire back the other way, but if winds can change once, they can do it again and it could so easily have been much worse for us.

The fires have left us without DSL at times here, as John at Sorted Sites points out, that the fires "caused some of Telefonica's ADSL internet servers to go down, leaving many people without internet access."

Masca Village Destroyed

The emblematic and picturesque village of Masca, which is just over the mountains from here, was not as fortunate as we were and, we are still scratching our heads over how the fire could get down into that valley.

Reports vary widely between 4 houses burnt to the whole village having been turned to ashes, but frankly we do not know what is the real situation yet. Yesterday, the roads to Masca were still closed: they would not even let local inhabitants through to give food and water to the animals that have survived and have been without both for days. As you will see from this video though, the lower estimates look to be rather over optimistic:

Everyone in this valley has family or friends in Masca, who will probably have lost everything. An article in El Dia talked of the desolation and lists amongst others affected, an English girl, named as Susana, who has lived with her partner, Calvin, for 16 years in a house that they built themselves. The reports says that, having contained a lot of wood, it burnt completely.

The news about another English girl, married to an Italian, and who had only recently bought a house in Masca in the last 6-7 months and that they are restoring as a rural hotel, we are hoping at this point is better. Reports are that their house has escaped the flames and that their goats - which came from my friends Gregorio and Fernanda - are safe and sound.

If the international media coverage of the fire has been awful, the local media coverage, with one notable exception, has been not much better. That exception is Canarias7, who put together a special on the fire, including good use of Google Maps to show the area affected by the fire, which was started near Icod el Alto.

Francis at Television Daute in Los Silos was doing the best he could to bring live information on Tuesday, but his efforts were seriously hampered, because phone lines were out there and he had no links to his cameras in the affected areas. On Wednesday morning, the larger local stations were showing what happened on Tuesday still, only they weren't making that entirely clear, so one had absolutely no idea how things were progressing. In particular, I had no idea if I was allowed to return home, the town hall weren't manning phones and I had to phone a neighbour in the end to find out.

When I did come home on Wednesday, there was still a strong smell of "barbecued" pine in the air. Since coming home, I don't think I've been off the phone for long and we're all suffering "post traumatic stress" here, because we're all sniffing for burning smells and looking into the sky, temporarily worried that a grey cloud behaving like smoke could indeed be smoke.

Besides that, the helicopters continued to circle today, collecting water from the reservoir at Las Portelas here in the El Palmar valley, roughly once a minute. That seems too frequent for a simple cooling exercise, which adds to the concern. From there, they seem to be dropping the water over the area of Los Carizales, between here and what's left (if anything) of Masca.

For certain this fire is something that nobody here will forget in a hurry.

Fishermen's Friends: Fiestas del Gran Poder y La Virgen del Carmen in Puerto de la Cruz

On, or around the 16th July, fishermen all over Tenerife hold emotional processions in honour of their patron saint, La Virgen del Carmen. In Puerto de la Cruz these celebrations go overboard, almost literally, when the town honours not only La Virgen, but El Gran Poder de Dios as well. Oh, and San Telmo, the patron saint of Spanish and Portuguese fishermen, is thrown in (metaphorically speaking) for good measure. It's all part of the town's month long festivities, known simply as the July Fiestas.

Merrymaking includes the obligatory crowning of the fiesta queen, traditional Canarian dances, jazz and rock concerts, antique car rallies, sporting events, air displays, the procession of the Gran Poder and the popular 'Sardinada', where the air around the ermita de San Telmo is filled with the aroma of grilled fish and a couple of euros will get you a plate of sardines and a beaker of robust country wine.

The highlight of the fiestas is the 'embarcación de la Virgen del Carmen' on the 17th of July. If you're a newcomer to Spanish fiestas, don't expect a quiet, reserved affair. This is big, boisterous, wet, noisy and chaotic as well as being good natured, great fun, an unforgettable experience and a spectacle for the senses.

The best way to get into the fiesta swing is to buy a couple of beers and a plate of pinchos (lip-licking seasoned pork kebabs) from a harbour-side stall, chill out and enjoy the fun.

For anyone under twenty, the idea is to get as wet as possible and stay that way all day. This involves holding running water pistol battles, which amuse the older townspeople until a stray squirt hits them in the eye resulting in much use of the word "coño"; jumping, or being thrown into the harbour; and being drenched by basins of water cascading from balconies around the harbour. You don't have to be Einstein to deduce that shorts and t-shirts, preferably over swimming togs is sensible dress for the day. To really fit in, buy a Virgen del Carmen t-shirt from one of the stalls around Plaza del Charco.

By late afternoon finding a space by the harbour is nigh on impossible. If you're not of basketball player proportions, try standing behind a group of Canarian women. As they're normally five foot nothing, or less, it affords a good view.

At around 6.30, La Virgen and St Telmo or, as one Canarian woman mischievously described him to me, 'La Virgen's boyfriend', appear swaying on the shoulders of local fishermen with a motion which represents the rhythm of being on the ocean. The couple pause en route to the harbour for a heartfelt rendition of 'Ave Marie' (tissues definitely required), before being carried through the crowd to the water's edge.

After 'a few squeaky bum moments' as Sir Alex Ferguson might put it, San Telmo and then La Virgen are transferred aboard their brightly decorated boats amidst a frenzy of splashing and chanting of "no pasa nada, la Virgen está embarcada" (which pretty much means, "all's well with the world, the Virgin's safely on board") and taken on their annual sea trip around the bay, ensuring that a good fish supply is guaranteed for another year.

This excerpt was written by Jack Montgomery, freelance writer, photographer and editor of Real Tenerife Island Drives.

Copyright © 2007 Real Tenerife Island Drives. All rights reserved. No part of this article may be copied or reproduced without the written permission of Real Tenerife Island Drives.

Lying on a beach all day every day might make for a relaxing holiday, but memories of it fade as quickly as your sun tan. Island Drives is aimed at travellers who want to experience the real essence of Tenerife, not just its pools and beaches. If you want an unforgettable holiday as opposed to a good one, Real Tenerife Island Drives will make the difference.

A sampling of Canary Islands heritage

The Alamo, San Antonio, Texas. Yinan Chen [Public Domain]

Being able to trace ancestry back to settlers from the Canary Islands is a huge deal in San Antonio. Those settlers, a group of 15 families who travelled from the Canary Islands at the invitation of King Philip V of Spain, founded the small town of "La Villa de San Fernando" - as San Antonio, Texas was then called - on March 9, 1731. Probably the most famous contribution the Canary Islanders made was building the San Antonio de Valero Mission, later known as The Alamo.

This weekend, members of two folk groups - Princesa Dácil and Cabuqueros - are visiting San Antonio, from the Canary Islands to perform a series of demonstrations of traditional music and dance. Then, on Tuesday, they join Domingo Rodríguez Oramas, "El Colorao," one of the Canary Islands' best known timple - the traditional five stringed instrument - players, for a concert.

El folklore canario se escuchará en el Folk Live Festival de San Antonio de Texas

Darwin's frustrated visit to Tenerife

Charles Darwin as a young man

Iberianature weblog tells us that "This month's Quercus [magazine] has an interesting article on Charles Darwin's abortive visit Tenerife." Darwin, apparently, had been inspired to visit Teide after reading Alexander von Humboldt's account of his ascent of El Teide. Naturalist and explorer, Humboldt, had stopped six days at Tenerife for the ascent of the Peak in June 1799.

However, when the second survey expedition of HMS Beagle, under captain Robert FitzRoy, which the student clergyman Charles Darwin had joined as the captain's gentleman companion, arrived at the port of Santa Cruz at Tenerife in early January 1832, they were prevented from going ashore due to a cholera outbreak in England that would have required them to be quarantined for 12 days. Eager that no time would be lost on their primary mission, the captain gave orders for the ship to proceed to the Cape Verde Islands. Darwin was devastated at missing the chance to see the island of his dreams, and watched Tenerife fade off into the horizon.

"This was a great disappointment to Mr. Darwin, who had cherished a hope of visiting the Peak. To see it -- to anchor and be on the point of landing, yet be obliged to turn away without the slightest prospect of beholding Teneriffe again -- was indeed to him a real calamity." - Capt. Robert FitzRoy

One can understand why the Tenerife authorities were being cautionary, although cholera did eventually hit the islands.

A footnote in Richard F. Burton's "To the Gold Coast for Gold" reports, "The list of epidemics at Santa Cruz is rather formidable, e.g. 1621 and 1628, peste (plague); 1810 and 1862, yellow Jack; 1814, whooping cough, scarlatina, and measles; 1816-16, small-pox (2,000 victims); 1826, cough and scarlet fever; 1847, fatal dysentery; and 1861-62, cholera (7,000 to 12,000 deaths)."

In 1851, a cholera epidemic broke out in Gran Canaria which would bring about six thousand deaths and the Medal of Charity, was awarded to Santa Cruz de Tenerife by Queen Regent María Cristina in 1893 during the cholera epidemic, in which the citizens behaved bravely.

This explains why Charles Darwin and the Beagle turned away from the eco-diversity of Tenerife, but Darwin had questions, "Why are there fewer endemic species on islands than on the mainland? Where did these species come from? Why are they so similar to mainland species if their natural surroundings are so different?", that undoubtedly he would have pondered here.

Darwin's frustrated visit to Tenerife

PS: Visitors to Tenerife, who seem to be really interested in the Tenerife weather, may also like to know that the Beagle's Captain, Robert FitzRoy was "a pioneering meteorologist who made accurate weather forecasting a reality." He also pioneered the printing of a daily weather forecast in newspapers.

Public holidays in the Canary Islands

The Canary Islands

Another reader's question: "What holidays are celebrated in the Canary Islands?", the answer is that these are primarily based upon the Public holidays celebrated in Spain, which includes a mix of religious (Roman Catholic), national and regional observances, as well as some hyper-local ones too.

National Holidays

Date

English name

Local name

January 1	New Year's Day	Año Nuevo
Moveable	Good Friday	Viernes Santo
May 1	Labour Day	Día del Trabajador
August 15	Assumption	Asunción
October 12	National Day of Spain	Fiesta Nacional de España,  Día de la Hispanidad
November 1	All Saints	Todos los Santos
December 6	Constitution Day	Día de la Constitución
December 8	Immaculate Conception	Inmaculada Concepción
December 25	Christmas Day	Navidad del Señor

Canaries Day - Día de Canarias is celebrated on May 30th and Epiphany - Día de Reyes is a public holiday on January 6th. Although the latter is listed as optional, it is the big day of the Christmas period, so I think there would be civil unrest if it wasn't observed! Wikipedia previously said that Holy Thursday - Jueves Santo (the day before Good Friday), is not observed as a holiday in the Canary Islands. However, every year except 2007 (when it was swapped out for something else and many complained bitterly) it has been observed in Tenerife, to my knowledge.

Each island has it's own holiday, which, in Tenerife is usually Feb 2nd, Candlemas. 

Any of the holidays, National, regional, or local, can be omitted, given a day in lieu, or substituted, if the holiday falls on a Sunday. Holidays falling on a Saturday do not get moved. People often say that Spain has a lot of public holidays, but this is a fallacy as you have to remember that Spain has a six-day working week. 

Then you also have to add local holidays, usually for the patron / fiesta in individual towns. Shops might close in one area, but are open just a few miles away. In Santa Cruz, Shrove Tuesday is always a holiday for Carnival. Each municipality declares two additional days of local holidays, which, once added to the national, regional and island ones, adds up to 14 public holidays, decreed by law.

Anyway visitors need not worry about finding things to do and getting fed. With the economy relying on tourism, somewhere will be open 365 days a year, particularly in the resorts. Even in other areas, if the day off is for a fiesta, then there'll be processions to watch and plenty of hot dog and food stalls open.

If you live here, of course, you won't get any important business done on those days and, if you work here in anything to do with the tourist sector, the chances are that you will never have a day off on anyone's public holiday!

Can we still fly to Tenerife North?

Tenerife North Airport, formerly Los Rodeos. Aisano [CC BY-SA 3.0]

Richard Green, writing in the Times Online, in response to a reader's question about flights to Tenerife North Airport from the UK, said that, "Tenerife North comes with more baggage than most airports" and continued, "Formerly known as Los Rodeos, it was from here that General Franco flew to the mainland in 1936 to ignite the Spanish Civil War." Er, nope. Whilst Franco did start his journey from Tenerife in 1936, because he was stationed there at the time, however, he did not fly from Los Rodeos. On July 17th, 1936, Franco embarked upon the mail steamship, Viera y Clavijo to Las Palmas in Gran Canaria. The famous Dragon Rapide flight that took Franco to Africa, never came to Tenerife and met him in Gran Canaria. The flight didn't go to mainland Spain either.

There was a bit of an airfield at Los Rodeos from 1929, but it did not become an airport until later. Los Rodeos was undergoing improvement works, ordered by the Tenerife Island Corporation, in 1936. It remained closed during the Civil War and was reopened in January 1941. It didn't get a runway until 1945.

The English version, at Wikipedia, just says, "One famous incident involving the use of a DH.89 was in 1936 when Francisco Franco escaped in one from Canarias to the Spanish Morocco, at the start of the Spanish Civil War." 

The translation of the Spanish version, however, gives us the full story, which is rather more spine chilling:

To put Franco at the head of the insurrection in Morocco, without awakening the suspicions of the Spanish Government, Luis Bolín (a correspondent of the ABC in London), with the help of intermediaries, [Marques] Luca de Tena [owner of the monarchist ABC newspaper] and Spanish inventor, Juan de la Cierva, contracted, on July 11th, 1936, a twin-engined De Havilland DH 89 Dragon Rapide with pilot, Captain Begg, a plane which had belonged to the Duque de Gales (Duke of Wales) [1], at Croydon aerodrome; the only plane that could be found in condition to travel immediately. So as to not raise suspicions over the journey, it carried, as passengers an English Major in the Reserve, his daughter and her friend [2], who had been offered free passages to Tenerife as tourists. They got lost over the peaks of Europe [Pyrenees] and had to return to Biarritz to refuel, continuing to fly to Lisbon and then on to the Canary Island airport of Gando in Gran Canaria, after a stop-off in Casablanca. The tourists then continued to Tenerife [3], where they had to give the strange message "Galicia saluda a Francia" (Galicia sends it's regards to France), to a doctor. Franco, meanwhile, waited for the arrival of the Dragon Rapide, in the Hotel Madrid in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, where he had gone with his family, to the funeral of soldier (Balmes), having sought permission so as not to raise suspicions. When Franco boarded the Dragon Rapide, he was in civilian clothes, he had shaved off his moustache and torn up his military ID documentation, passing himself off as an English tourist [4].

Franco flew to Agadir, then on to Casablanca and Tetuán in Morocco. He re-entered Spain, via Ceuta, by car.

[1] Do they mean Prince of Wales, or Duke of Elsewhere?

[2] The "fake" tourists were a retired major, Hugh Pollard, his daughter Diana and Dorothy Watson. The two girls, blondes (with the habit of keeping their cigarettes and lighters in their knicker elastic, apparently), were there to divert the authorities' attention. Pollard was presented as just a rich bloke interested in fishing, but declassified M16 documents indicate that Pollard was an agent of said service. The full name of the ABC correspondent, who travelled as the forth "tourist", was Luís Bolín Bidwell, who was half English.

Editor of the English Review, Douglas Jerrold, who was of extreme right persuasion and a sympathizer of Adolf Hitler, and Juan March, Spanish financier and British agent on the side of Francisco Franco's forces and founder of the Fundación Juan March, were also implicated in the arrangements.

Charlie Pottins in British Friends of Franco, reiterates much of the above and more, also including a translation of further details that appear in the Spanish account above, namely, "Franco's flight had been planned over lunch at Simpsons in the Strand where Douglas Jerrold, editor of the right-wing Catholic English Review met Bolín, London correspondent of the ABC newspaper and later Franco's propaganda and censorship chief. They decided to charter a De Havilland Dragon Rapide aircraft and a pilot, Captain Cecil Bebb, from Olley Air Services at Croydon."

[3] After landing in Gran Canaria, the tourists continued to Tenerife by boat.

[4] Which certainly wouldn't have worked if anyone had spoken to him!

The story of this significant flight is told - I understand with historical accuracy - in the 1986 film, Dragón Rapide. The actual Dragon Rapide aircraft used for Franco's flight, with registration number G-ACYR, was incorporated into service with the Royal Air Force during WW2. After the war, it was bought and sold a couple of times, before being retired from service after having its airworthiness certificate revoked in 1953. It was then acquired by a Mr. Griffith, who gave it to General Franco as a gift. Franco, in turn donated it to the as yet then non-existent Museo del Aire military aviation museum at Cuatros Vientos airfield in Madrid. That's where it still is, having been restored to the livery it carried in 1936.

If anyone should be carrying baggage and hanging their heads in shame over this incident, which sparked both a bloody civil war and almost 40 years of dictatorship, it should be the British, not Los Rodeos.

All flights to and from Tenerife North airport are inter-island flights and flights to the Spanish mainland, so no, you won't fly to Tenerife North from the UK.

The British pilot whose actions triggered the Spanish Civil War

The Secret History of the Potato

Andean potatoes grown in Tenerife

When you eat your humble spud for dinner, do remember that it was introduced into Europe via the Canary Islands in the mid-16th century. It has always been in question, though, whether they originally came from the Andean or Chilean varieties. My neighbour, Gregorio, proudly announced, when he brought these round that they are papas andinas (Andean potatoes). He grows them here in Las Portelas in the El Palmar valley in Tenerife, but, he explained, they were sown with seeds that had originally come from the Andes region.

However, "Most scientists have long assumed that European potatoes, the foundation for all modern cultivated potatoes, come from the Chilean variety, because Chilean lowlands resemble Europe's environment most closely."

"But between the Americas and Europe, in potato history, lie the Canary Islands, off northwest Africa. Shipping records from 1567 make these islands the first known home to potatoes outside of Central and South America. And some researchers say the potatoes there resemble the Andean variety but have never had genetic proof." Solving the long-disputed controversy over the origin of the European potato, it turns out it's both Andean and Chilean origin. "Scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of La Laguna in the Canary Islands and the International Potato Centre in Lima, Peru, used genetic markers to solve the mystery." Further, the report says that "Scientists believe the landraces of those early potatoes still grow there."

Local growers, it seems, would already consider that as fact.

Potato foundation story