Things to do in Puerto de la Cruz for self travelers

Leave Puerto de la Cruz and drive straight up to Mount Teide – Spain's highest peak and one of the world's great active volcanoes. Your guide is Benito, a fictional Canarian goat herder who has spent his entire life on this island. Sharp, funny, and deeply knowledgeable, he narrates the 45-kilometre ascent from sea level to over 2,000 metres as the landscape transforms beneath your wheels – from banana plantations and ancient laurel forest to towering Canarian pine and the raw black lava fields of the caldera. Along the way: the volcanic eruption that made this harbour the most important on the island overnight, the underground water galleries supplying 84% of Tenerife's water, the Guanche kingdoms that ruled this valley and the gods they believed lived inside the volcano, the Hollywood films shot in this exact landscape, and why NASA tests Mars rovers up here. No bus, no group, no fixed schedule. Just a car, an open road, and a goat herder who knows every rock on this island. The drive ends at Roques de García inside the National Park – rock formations so extraordinary they once appeared on Spanish banknotes.