Garachico Revisited

Garachico Revisited

We’re back in Garachico after a one year absence. As soon as we arrived if felt like we had returned to an old friend, the town has that sort of friendly feeling. We particularly enjoy the evenings sitting in the centre of the Plaza de la Liberdad with the locals and the odd tourist, at the bandstand that had been transformed into a bar café kiosk, enjoying a glass of wine or a ‘barraquito especial’.

There are some fine restaurants in Garachico if you look beyond the ones on the seafront where the tourists seem content to sit right by the main road with the car fumes. If only they would venture in to the town in the streets behind, this is where the town’s real charm lies, with authentic cuisine and a warm welcome. The food is of a higher standard too, as the restaurants are not simply turning out food, that frankly isn’t that good at times, to passing tourists who are only visiting for a couple of hours.

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Garachico veiwed from the rock pools

Our advice is to get in to the town itself away from the sea front, and in to the quiet back streets where there are a couple of shops selling local crafts and produce. This is where the true ‘Isla Baja’ Tenerife culture is to be seen.

Garachico also has its own cigar manufacturer, where you can see the cigars being hand made by the chap in his shop. It’s a little known fact that emigrants from the Canary Islands during a past economic crisis, helped found the Cuban cigar industry, and their returning descendants have brought these skills back to Tenerife.

For the energetic there is a lovely walk leading from the Plaza de la Liberdad up a mountain path, on the walking route PR-TF 42, to the village of San Juan del Reporo a few hundred meters above the town. The walk is not easy, but it is not challenging either, and is most enjoyable, with superb views of the town and the coastline. In fact we found the hilly streets of San Juan del Reporo village more of a challenge than the mountain path itself.

Mountain footpath GarachicoFootpath PR-TF 42 on the mountain above Garachico

The walk continues up to the Chenyo volcano if you are feeling really energetic, but we opted to walk just a bit beyond the village (we had left a bit late, and didn’t want to get caught up there in the dark), where we turned around and descended back down the foot path to Garachico.

The round trip took us about 3.5 hours, but we went at a very lazy pace and stopped for photo opportunities all the way up, looking at the flowers, the odd lizard, and some very curious looking black and white spiders.

Garachico has a little micro climate all of its own, where clouds form just above the mountain cooling the town down, but you can see that just a couple kilometres or so away there is still glorious cloudless skies.

Mountain footpath Garachico
Garachico viewed from the mountain path PR-TF 42