At 3,718 metres above sea level, my eight-year-old looked down from the Mount Teide cable car platform and whispered: “Dad, I can see Africa.” He could not – it was too hazy – but the fact that he believed it tells you what this place does to a child’s imagination. Take your kids inland and upward, and the whole trip changes.
We spent a week here with our boys, aged eight and ten. The beach days were fine – good, even. But the four experiences that stuck with them happened away from the sand.
Mount Teide cable car – the day they touched the clouds
Driving up to Teide National Park from the coast feels like leaving Earth. The landscape shifts from banana plantations to pine forest to volcanic moonscape within forty minutes. Both boys pressed their faces against the car windows and went quiet – a rare event.
The cable car costs about €37 per adult and is free for children under 12, covering the climb from 2,356 to 3,555 metres in eight minutes. At the top, the air is thin, the wind bites, and the views stretch across the entire island. Bring warm layers – we arrived in shorts and regretted it instantly. The temperature drops by about 15 degrees from the coast, and at altitude the wind makes it feel colder still.
Book tickets online weeks in advance, especially during peak season – slots sell out. We showed up at 10am without a reservation and waited over an hour. The best conditions are clear mornings before clouds build around the summit, so aim for the earliest slot you can book. The afternoon slots tend to have shorter queues but hazier views.
Loro Parque – better than we expected
I had mixed feelings about Loro Parque before visiting – the orca show draws controversy, and I understand why. But the rest of the park is genuinely world-class. The gorilla habitat kept our ten-year-old watching for thirty minutes, and the penguin enclosure – a climate-controlled Antarctic environment – made both boys laugh out loud at the birds sliding on ice.
Buy tickets online: €47 per adult versus €49 at the gate. The saving is small, but you also skip the ticket queue, which on a Saturday morning stretched past the entrance. The park sits in Puerto de la Cruz on the northern coast, about 40 minutes from the southern tourist resorts. A combo ticket with Siam Park exists and saves around €15 per person if you plan to do both.
Highlights our boys ranked themselves:
- Gorillas – “the baby one looked right at me”
- Penguins – the cold blast when you walk in is hilarious for kids
- Parrot show – trained parrots doing tricks, funny and impressive
- The aquarium tunnel – smaller than Barcelona’s but still a hit
- Dolphin show – the crowd-pleaser of the park, seats fill fast so arrive 15 minutes early
La Orotava – the old town nobody mentions
Twenty minutes from Puerto de la Cruz, the historic town of La Orotava sits on a hillside with views straight up toward Mount Teide. Colonial architecture, wooden balconies, cobblestone streets, and almost no tourists. We stumbled on it by accident while looking for a lunch spot and ended up staying three hours.
The boys liked the Casa de los Balcones – a 17th-century house with carved wooden balconies and a courtyard full of plants, free to enter. The viewpoint at Mirador de Humboldt offers one of the best panoramas on the island, and the older boy used my phone to take about forty photos of the volcano from there.
La Orotava is the kind of place where you sit in a square with a coffee while the kids chase pigeons. No attractions in the traditional sense, just a beautiful town that slows the pace after busier days.
Siam Park – the waterpark they still talk about
Siam Park sits next to the beach resorts in the south, but calling it a “beach experience” misses the point. It is a full-scale Thai-themed waterpark that has been voted Europe’s best water park multiple times, and after visiting, I understand why.
The Tower of Power – a near-vertical slide that drops through a tank of sharks – made my ten-year-old scream in a pitch I have never heard before. He immediately ran back up to do it again. The wave pool produces waves big enough to bodyboard, and the lazy river winds through the park for over a kilometre.
Book online: roughly €36 per adult versus €44 at the gate, which adds up quickly for a family of four. We arrived at opening and stayed until 5pm. Both boys rated it above every other waterpark they have visited, including Aqualandia in Benidorm.
Getting around and practical tips
You need a car for Mount Teide and La Orotava – bus connections exist but take twice as long and limit your flexibility. We rented a small car for four days at about €120 total, and I checked Tenerife petrol prices before picking it up – filling up at stations in smaller towns saved us a few euros compared to the ones near the airport and resorts.
For the full rundown of family attractions across the island, Tenerife with kids lists 25 tested options with ages and prices. We used it to plan our week and skipped a couple of tourist traps thanks to the honest reviews.
If you have an extra day and want something entirely different from the resort south, drive 30 minutes north from Santa Cruz to the Anaga Rural Park. It is a cloudforest – moss-covered laurel trees, mist drifting through ravines, hiking trails from one to three hours long. Free entry, almost no other tourists. Our boys said it felt like walking through a jungle. The contrast with the volcanic landscape around Teide is staggering.
Tenerife has beaches, yes, but the volcano, the old towns, and the parks are what our boys remember. The sand they have forgotten – the cable car ride and the gorilla that “looked right at me” get retold at every family gathering.