Why The Real Tenerife Guidebook is Different

Tenerife has a new guidebook – THE REAL TENERIFE: The Insiders’ Guide to Tenerife

Tenerife is an incredibly popular destination that attracts millions of visitors each year. This, subsequently, has resulted in a lot of guidebooks written and published by everyone from the famous guidebook stables to new kids on the block.

At Real Tenerife we’ve produced our own guidebook. The question is what makes the Real Tenerife guidebook different from all the others out there?

We’re professional travel writers
It’s what we do for a living. We’ve contributed to Tenerife and the Canary Islands guides for websites and some of the well known names in the guidebook and newspaper world. But that’s doing it the way someone else wants it.

We wanted to be able to write a guidebook about Tenerife that was informative, entertaining and, at the same time, candid.

We live, work and play on Tenerife
Tenerife in summer is a different place than Tenerife in winter and that’s not just to do with the weather. There are differences in Tenerife from month to month. You have to live on the island, or have visited it every single month to know what these are. Even the best travel writer in the universe can’t get a fully rounded handle on a place if they only visit every so often.

Tenerife north is different from Tenerife south just as staying on the coast is different than staying at 1000 metres or staying in a purpose built resort is a million miles away from staying in the capital city. It’s essential to have spent a lot of time in different parts of the island to know what the differences are.

We’ve pushed out the Zs in everything from luxury hotels in Costa Adeje to a tent in the pine forest above Vilaflor. We’ve eaten in restaurants frequented by King Juan Carlos, fishermen’s guilds in Punta de Hidalgo, ramshackle guachinches in La Orotava and drive-through McDonalds in Candelaria.

We’ve drank at bars in Veronicas, squeezed in between grizzled caballeros at cerveza kiosks in the hills and salsa’d (badly) at Cuban clubs. We’ve seen famous blues stars at music festivals in Santa Cruz and watched local bad boy rock stars smash up their guitars at biker festivals in Garachico.

We’ve dressed up for Carnaval’s all night street parties, stood in the darkness in chilly La Laguna streets to watch silent religious processions and shared cervezas with toothless inebriates in obscure hill towns.

We’ve climbed Mount Teide to watch sunrise and trekked for hours through ancient laurel forests to hamlets where access is only be sea or by foot. We’ve shared a joke with the mayor of Santa Cruz, shared a bedroom with Tenerife’s president and marched arm in arm with Canarios in protest at political shenanigans.

These examples are only the tip of our Tenerife iceberg.

The Real Tenerife is full of unique information that comes from first hand experience of living, working and playing amongst the Canarios combined with hours of research in tiny town libraries, translating quirky information from books that no-one outside of the town is ever likely to read.

As a result we’ve been interviewed by the Spanish press because of our ‘insight’ into life in the Canary Islands.

The Real Tenerife guidebook is a culmination of years of personal experience and objective research.

That’s why we know it is unique.

Plus who else has a man carrying a goat into the sea on the cover?

The Real Tenerife is now available in paperback as well as being also available on Kindle.

Jack is co-owner, writer and photographer for BuzzTrips and the Real Tenerife series of travel websites plus lots of other things. Follow Jack on Google+