Walking on Tenerife, That’s The First Time I’ve Ever Seen That!

Normally it’s the scenery that astounds us when we’re out exploring Tenerife’s network of trails and forest paths, emerging from dense pines, or turning a corner in a barranco to be faced with an unexpected ‘WOW’ vista. However, the other day the weather performed a neat little trick which I’ve certainly never witnessed before.

We’d been walking above Las Montañetas in Garachico’s upper reaches when the bruma (low cloud) started to roll in; turning what had been a brilliantly blue sky a shade of chilly looking grey.
As we descended toward the cloud, expecting at any moment to be enveloped by its wispy fingers, it seemed to keep a respectful distance so that the part we walked in remained in sunshine, but a thick fog obscured the landscape to the side.

It’s an interesting enough phenomena, especially if you haven’t experienced it before, but anyone who’s walked in the Anaga Mountains or the upper La Orotava Valley will be more than familiar with getting mugged by the bruma.

It was what occurred after we moved from a volcanic landscape into the forest that really blew my mind. As we walked through the forest I was pretty sure I heard the sound of dripping water. I mentioned it to Andy and we stopped and stood still, listening. Sure enough, the still of the quiet forest was broken by what sounded like quite heavy rainfall around us…yet we were still standing in dappled sunlight.

Then Andy noticed that the path about a foot in front of where we were standing was drenched and there was a neat line dissecting where the path was wet and where it was dry.

It was like an invisible force field was in place and it was chucking it down just in front of us and yet bone dry where we stood. As we looked ahead we could see rainwater streaming off the leaves in front of us; I was so close I could even reach out a hand and plunge it into the part of the forest that was raining.

We stood wondering what to do, we didn’t have any wet weather gear, half expecting the rain to soak us, but it continued to rain just in front of where we stood.  After a few minutes, it hadn’t abated, so we decided that we’d have to leave our ‘dry’ spot and head into it if we wanted to proceed. So hunching our shoulders we stepped out of our force shield and into the rain, took two steps and emerged into dry weather again.

Amazingly the rain corridor only covered an area of a few yards. It was like stepping into a shower and out of the other side again.

The weather on Tenerife will never cease to amaze me. When people ask ‘what’s the weather like on Tenerife?’ they don’t realise how complex a question that actually is.

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