Tenerife
Tenerife
Tenerife is an island in the province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife located in the Canary Archipelago (Spain) with an area of 2,034.21 km2, making it the largest island in the Canaries. It is also the most populous island (812,839 inhabitants in 2004). This island was created by volcanic activity and its oldest fragments (Anaga and Teno) began to be shaped around 7 million years ago. Successive eruptions between both mountain masses created the rest of the insular edifice along three structural axes. The large Teide volcano (3,718 metres, the highest point in Like nearly the entire archipelago, Tenerife is mountainous with cragged relief. This characteristic has conditioned the diversity of the topoclimates, the biogeographical environment and human activity throughout history. The island is distinguished by two main regions: the North, which lies windward of the trade winds and receives a great deal of moisture from them, thereby counteracting the effect of sun and compensating for the general lack of rain with mist precipitation; and the South, which is far more arid, practically a desert in certain areas.
Broadly speaking, three geographical levels can be distinguished based on altitude in both halves of the island. The conditions found on the summits of the ridges remain very similar to the original state of the natural landscape, although human intervention –from traditional pasturing to massive forest repopulations in the middle of the 20th Century– has had an impact; today the entire region is a protected natural space under different administrative categories, the most important of which is Teide National Park.
Traditionally, the midlands have been the perfect area for rural culture; evolved soil, which was once covered by Monteverde forests, and the benefits of humidity later sustained agricultural economies geared toward personal consumption or supplying the internal market. But since the 1970s the economic system of Tenerife has been reorganised based on the tertiary sector. This change has converted the midlands into a residential area for people who work in construction and tourism and who make a daily commute to the more vibrant areas of the island located on the coast, below 300 metres, where the climatic conditions that were once an obstacle have now become a resource. The sun and beaches have converted Tenerife (and a large part of the archipelago) into an international tourism power: Tenerife alone has over 5 million visitors a year. This of course has come at the expense of coastal agriculture irrigated by water galleries –horizontal perforations carved out in the highlands and whose water is channelled to plantations of tomatoes and especially bananas which are grown for exportation.
Two motorways divide the capital, Santa Cruz de Tenerife Santa Cruz de Tenerife
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