About The Real Tenerife

The Real Tenerife is our love letter to an island that we have called home for the last few years.

We relish experiencing the differences in cultures when we travel and, despite the way it is generally portrayed, Tenerife is a destination that has tradition and culture by the bucket load – black, volcanic sand bucket load clearly.

Simply put, The Real Tenerife is aimed at travellers with similar tastes to us. It won’t suit, or probably be liked, by anyone who only wants to spend a fortnight snoring on the sand but hey, there are plenty of other websites around for them. Our continuing mission is to promote those aspects of Tenerife that we think would appeal to those discerning travellers out there.

Like I said it is a love letter but, like most love affairs, there are the occasional spats – so not everything in The Real Tenerife will be presented through rose-tinted spectacles.

Who Are We?
We are Andrea and Jack Montgomery. In 2003 we swapped our lives in Manchester for the north of Tenerife. Since then we’ve written two guidebooks about Tenerife (Real Tenerife Island Drives & Going Native in Tenerife) and contributed to a few others.

We also write walking guides (Island Walks), manage a Tenerife blog for the travel company Sunshine.co.uk, are Tenerife destination experts for Simonseeks. We’re directors of Tenerife Magazine as well as running our own individual blogs, the travel website Buzz Trips and a few other bits of freelance writing, copy-writing and corporate blogging…but you´ll soon be dozing off if I carry on. The upshot is that we know – and have written – a lot about Tenerife.

What Makes The Real Tenerife Different?
Groan, not another guide about Tenerife? Afraid so, but – and this is a but of Mount Teide-sized proportions – The Real Tenerife is different from most websites about Tenerife because of one thing- we are experience junkies.
We’ve watched sunrise from the summit of Mount Teide and bathed in midsummer waters at midnight; belted out This Sex is on Fire in bars in Playa de las Américas and cried to Ave Maria at fishermen’s fiestas; downed too many mojitos in Cuban salsa bars and shared vino del pais from goatskin bottles with caballeros in the mountains; slept in palatial hotels and under canvas all on our lonesome in the pine forest; cross-dressed at carnaval and been spellbound at silent, religious parades; battled Atlantic rollers and floated in the rock pools at Garachico, trekked through ravines to remote hamlets and followed tapas trails through Tenerife’s capital. We’ve also spent hours sitting in libraries pouring through volumes of Spanish text translating mind-numbingly boring prose in order to find obscure details that just aren’t mentioned anywhere else. And we have conducted business within the Canarian community as well as the ex-pat one, so The Real Tenerife isn’t just about information for visitors.

We don’t just write about Tenerife; we experience Tenerife – the good, the bad and the ugly bits – then we write about it.

Why Another Real Tenerife Website?
Anyone who knows us will know that we already have a number of established Tenerife websites – Real Tenerife Island Drives, Going Native in Tenerife, Real Tenerife Blog, Living Beneath the Volcano blog, Walking Tenerife. IT’S ALL TOO MUCH!

We were becoming as stretched as the skin on an ageing Hollywood star’s cosmetic face. It made sense to combine some of those sites and bring them under one cosy and more user-friendly roof.

This is the new baby. We hope you like it.

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