Skip to main content

Santa Cruz Tenerife 2026

It's a year to the week since we were in Santa Cruz, Tenerife. We were much impressed that time and I suppose in a year its not going to change much.  Our plan was to hire a car and scoot off out of town.. maybe find the cable car and go up mount Tieda.  No photos of mountain as completely shrouded in cloud... The weather forcast was not good and turned out to be correct so didnt bother. Instead we chose to go 'do' the town galleries. 

A very pleasant way to spend a rainy day in town. 
The TEA, Tenerife Espacio de la Artes houses the city library as well as art and from upstairs it was an interesting perspective of angled walls and glass.  The art bit was holding two exhibitions.  A huge collection of work by Oscar Dominguez spanning his long career and involvement with surrealist art on the ground floor and a fantastic exhibition of art by Nestor Martin- Fernandez de la Torre.  This was a new artist to me but I loved his work. 
Born in Gran Canaria 1887 - 1938,  he seems to little known outside of the islands in spite of studying in london and Barcelona. Heavily infuenced by pre- raphaelite art in both England and Spain his paintings are very rich and imaginative. 
Its so nice to find new (to me) art... the photos dont do justice to his paintings and are just a snapshop of some of his painting taken from very definetive collections. 
We left the gallery and it was raining quite hard so we ducked into a partially covered market that looked promising. Most of it was shut... not sure if that was the weather... lunch effect or a january tuesday effect. We did find a local stall where were found a almost perfect spherical cheese ball - bit like a cheese doughnut and a curly cheese finger. Both were very tasty.
After that we braved the rain and went to what we thought was another big gallery but it turned out to be a small indepant place showing the work of a local young artist Alba Dorta. Again lovely paintings, strong colours and a couple of nice sculptural pieces. 

We got quite wet, we decided that basically Santa Cruz is one big messy town so we wandered back to base.  Tbh mycalves and thighs were still abit cross at my misuse of them on the two previous days..

Quick update on the cabin scenario...  on arrival at midnight of the bangs and metalic clanging we once again entertained the security chap who agreed it was very intrusive.  Its a strange feeling being in a cabin box... Dr Fred laid in bed, me in my nighty and a uniformed chap standing there listening to robot wars going off above you... anyway he said he would go ask them to tone it down and suggested we  go to the desk tomorrow (again) and tell them. The night was quieter until the dawn robot chorous and after breakfast,  when I went to the desk, they as good as, but more politely, and very apologetically,  said tough.... if we were paying guest we might have more leverage but we are mere minions here to entertain... c'est la vie.  THEN.... last night the noise was minimal (on comparison). So we both got a full nights - only broken 3 or 4 times - sleep.  And I have to say we both feel so much better for it.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Alesund

Our final destination stop was Alesund. This is a very pretty town in southern Norway built on a peninsula. All the houses are painted pretty colours and a lot of the architecture is all very Art Nouveau based. This is because the town itself was completely burnt to the ground In 1904 by a fire for which they never found the original cause. The whole town had to be rebuilt and this became a huge National Effort and a lot of prominent and up and coming architects flocked to the town to stick there 20 pence in. Consequently the town is very heavily Art Nouveau which was very fashionable at the time. There is this wonderful Museum just off the harbour which is a very beautiful Art Nouveau house. It has amazing panelling, doors, wallpaper, and it's all furnished with beautiful art Nouveau Furniture. It also house a collection of of enameled Art Nouveau Trinkets,boxes, spoons, jewellery, very very beautiful.   There is an interesting collection of old books and paintings a...

Almost last chapter... In which our Go Stargazing team watch Astonishing Aurora Borealis seen from the deck of the Astonishing Borealis!!!

The weather brightened considerably and the snowy peaks lining our sail down the fjiords  looked glorious and sparkly in the sunshine against a (mainly) blue sky back drop.   More awesome scenary.... the Go Stargazing team wrapt up their lectures ... only searching for the illusive Northern Lights remained.  The tension from the night before dissolved in the sunshine the forecast for Aurora borealis was looking fairly positive - it was the captains farewell cocktsil party so everyone had their gladrags on.. We ate dinner and sky remained clear so we headed back to our room and donned as many layers as we could move in and proceeded to deck 10 in anticipation of stars and northern lights..... it did not dissappiont - just we got there as the bridge announced that the lights could be seen on the starboard side of the ship. It was stunning. Slowly the intensity built. The auroral green became brighter and bigger areas appe...

Istanbul

We had a really excellent day exploring Istanbul. It's over 25 years since I went to Istanbul on a long weekend trip with somebody that I thought was my friend at the time. But with with hindsight.... Well that's another unimportant story for another time... All that time ago I did have a brilliant time and loved the city. I loved the mix of east meets west - It left me intending to return sooner than later so I was really looking forward to revisiting.   I was a bit unsure about how Dr Fred would take to the place because it is enormous, it's bustling, it's noisy, it's smelly. There are lots of exciting backstreets and of course there are a lot of tourists - And I was determined to visit the Grand Bazaar... Istanbul didn't disappoint - but I have to say it was a very different city to how it had been all those years ago. It seemed even bigger, and was definitely more full of visitors. I had started with a plan that packed the ...