Most people living here rarely talk about the sunshine and prefer to talk about the calima, the rental car scam, the tap water, and why the TF-1 turns into a car park every single morning which is what this article is about.
The Calima Will Ruin at Least One of Your Days
Every now and then the wind that comes from the Sahara desert drags with it a fine orange dust across the whole island. It changes the colour of the sky to a strange yellowy brown and the temperature jumps ten degrees overnight. It makes the air feel thick and dry and it gets into everything. Your car, your washing, and even your throat are not immune to this fine dust.
Locals call it the calima and residents here genuinely dread it. Not in a dramatic way but more in the way you dread an unnecessary inconvenience . It’s just part of life here, and it’s one of the first things long term expats warn newcomers about.
During a bad one, the beaches can be quite empty and people with asthma or hay fever tend to stay indoors. The heat is a different kind of heat to the normal sunny warmth because it’s airless and pressing and it doesn’t let up at night either. Tourists arrive expecting a sunny week only to find themselves on their balconies squinting at the orange haze wondering if something’s on fire in the distance.
They often last a day or two but on the odd occasion, can sometimes last a bit longer. AEMET tracks Saharan dust movement and publishes alerts regularly so it’s worth checking before you travel, especially around the months of July and September.
Many Residents Don’t Drink Tap Water
Tenerife has almost no natural fresh water and gets its supply almost entirely from desalination plants and although the tap water is technically safe, it tastes like it’s been through an industrial process, because it has. It tastes metallic and chemical due to the process of desalination.
Walk into any supermarket here and you’ll see an entire aisle of large five litre water bottles. Locals buy them by the trolley load and Expats who’ve been here a while either have a water delivery service, or a filter fitted under the kitchen sink.
Tourists drink the tap water, feel a bit off for a day or two, and put it down to travel or the food but it’s often the water. A five litre bottle costs about forty cents at the Mercadona and other outlets so it’s worth the price.
The Noise in the South at Night Isn’t Occasional. It’s the Default.
If you’re staying anywhere near the main nightclub areas like Veronica’s, you’ll find the noise at night a little too loud and sometimes constant. The bars obviously don’t close early and the music carries further than you’d expect in the warm air with the streets being loud well past 3am.
Residents who live near the tourist zones have either made their peace with it or moved further out. The ones who haven’t are very vocal about it in the local expat Facebook groups, which, if you want an honest and occasionally furious picture of life on the island, are genuinely worth a look.
The practical point is this: if you’re a light sleeper and you’ve booked a hotel near the seafront in the south, you’re going to have a bad time. Two streets back from the strip makes a real difference. Four streets back and it’s a different world.
The Rental Car Scam That Expats Warn Every New Arrival About
This comes up constantly in resident circles, and it’s been running for years.
Some rental companies at Tenerife South airport, mostly the smaller budget operators with off site lots, have a habit of finding damage on your car when you return it, usually already there when you picked it up. It’s easy to forget to check or miss the damage when picking up the vehicle when you’re in a hurry to get to the hotel or apartment where you’ve booked. This neglect can sometimes cost you several hundred euros on returning the car without any evidence of the damage when picking up the car to begin with.
The fix is simple but you have to do it before you drive away. Photograph every panel of the car including the roof, the underside of both bumpers, the wheel arches, and every door. Send the photos to yourself immediately so that they’re timestamped and if the company tries to charge you for something that’s clearly visible in your photos, you have a strong case they can’t disprove.
Stick to the well known companies if you can because these problems tend to happen with budget operators, and never, ever sign anything without checking the car yourself first, even if the person behind the desk seems impatient.
The TF-1 Motorway Is a Trap Between 8am and 10am
The TF-1 runs along the south coast and looks like it should get you anywhere quickly but residents know better. Traffic jams usually happen at peak hours between 8am and 10am, and again from 4pm to 7pm.Unfortunately the road was not built for the amount of traffic it has now so the locals have learnt to find workarounds such as leaving earlier than planned, or using back roads to avoid the jams on the highway.
The back roads are slower in terms of speed but often faster in actual journey time during rush hour. They’re also considerably more interesting to drive, winding up through banana plantations and small towns where the road narrows to one lane and you have to pull in to let a lorry past. Worth it, honestly.
The Stray Cat Situation Is More Complicated Than It Looks
There are cats everywhere on the island living in colonies around car parks, on wasteland, behind restaurants, or along the seafront walls. Most of them are managed by volunteer groups who try to keep their population to a manageable level, but doesn’t resolve the situation.
Residents are divided on this in a way that gets quite heated. Some people feed the colonies every single evening, leaving out food with the kind of dedication you’d give a pet. Others think the whole thing has gone too far and the colonies are a public health issue. It’s one of those topics that can derail an entire dinner party among expats here.
Tourists find it charming for about two days then they start noticing how thin some of the cats are, and how many there are. It’s not a crisis, but it’s one of those background realities of life here that residents talk about constantly and visitors never think about at all.
Bureaucracy Here Will Test You in Ways You Didn’t Expect
This one’s mainly for anyone thinking about spending longer on the island, or moving here. But it’s worth knowing.
Getting official paperwork done in Tenerife often takes longer than expected and can really rub people up the wrong way when they’re used to more organised schedules like those in Northern Europe. Tasks like opening a bank account, getting an NIE number, registering with the local council, or sorting out residency paperwork, will often take multiple visits to achieve. It’s a system that moves at its own pace regardless of how urgent your situation is so you just have to be patient with it as there is no other way.
Residents here have a saying, that whatever time you think it’ll take, double it. It’s tot because people are unhelpful but because the process is the process and there’s no shortcut through it.
I know that sounds like a minor thing, and maybe it is for some, but I’ve watched people arrive here full of enthusiasm for a new life and spend their first three months almost entirely consumed by paperwork. You have to go in knowing that and that it’s manageable. If you try comparing it to how things are done back in your home country, it will grind you down.
The Real Information Network Isn’t on Any Travel Website
Here’s something that took me a while to understand about the island, one that you too will soon discover if you’re here long enough. Official information and personal experience information can be quite the conflict.
There’s the official version of information from the tourist board and reputable travel blogs, as well as TripAdvisor reviews written by people who were here for only a week. Then there’s the version from residents in Facebook groups, WhatsApp chains, or gleaned from the conversations in the queue at the post office.
The real version is where you find out which restaurant just had a bad health inspection, which beach has had a water quality issue this week, which area has had a run of break-ins, and which new bar is actually worth the drive. It’s unfiltered, occasionally chaotic, and genuinely useful in a way that no travel article can match.
If you’re spending more than a week here, or seriously thinking about moving here, find your way into those types of groups like Tenerife Forum Community, and the information in them is the kind you won’t get anywhere else.
One Last Thing
The people who know this island best are the ones who’ve been here long enough to go through the entire process of disabling tourist mode and becoming residents. They’ve had the calima ruin a week. They’ve argued with a rental company. They’ve sat in TF-1 traffic for an hour going nowhere and learned to leave earlier. They buy their water in bulk and their patience in even larger quantities.
But they stay, many them anyway, and ff you ask them why, they’ll usually pause for a second before answering as if trying to find the right words for something they’ve stopped questioning.
That pause tells you more about Tenerife than any travel article ever will.
