The Canyon of Tonazaro

We Begin our tour driving to the secluded village of Tijoco Alto on the heights of Adeje in the south of the island of Tenerife, and parking the car in front of the Tasca Tonazaro, which is a magnificent rural restaurant where you can enjoy of one of the best traditional spicy goat meat dishes of the island and is open daily except Mondays.

In fact, once you have decided to hike up to the fabulous Canyon of Tonazaro, you can only conclude replenishing forces around its namesake tavern.

From our starting point, we follow the road to the summit passing in front of several rural houses with their chickens and roosters hovering around.

At one point, just over a kilometer from the car, we find a gate that marks the beginning of the forest road. Before crossing it, we take the dirt road that opens to the left and along the ravine, which will eventually lead us to our final destination.

This is a place where the original path has been largely blurred and where we should be very careful not to get lost, always walking on the edge of successive ravines that we will be finding in our way to Tonazaro.

One enjoys of a gorgeous fresh air, of a fantastic pine forest all of which is at a considerable altitude above sea level.

Gradually at the top, to the left, we will glimpse the splendid image of the stunning Canyon of Tonazaro, an amazing natural gorge, a fabulous cut of narrow vertical walls on the highest section of the renowned Barranco de Erques.

Poor maintenance of the trail, which is not signposted, leads us to think more than once that the only way to reach Tonazaro is crossing the ravines that separate us from him, but what one needs to do is to persevere in the side way of the ravine until you reach a point following the culverts water channel, where there is a step that saves us the ravine and that at a certain point, after crossing several terraces of ancient cultivated lands which are now semi abandoned, places us by our destiny.

At Tonazaro, you cannot avoid being surprised by the brutal natural cut, the giddiness of its stone walls and its privileged situation as a natural lookout over the lands of the southwestern coast of the island.

It is one of those Tenerife magical corners where silence is heard and where you feel an enormous telluric energy.

We return along the same path, but this time, once surpassed the terraces, we follow the canal until we reach some old carob trees where we find an old rural house in ruins that was the center of operations of the Fyffes Company.

This was a flagship company, which owned all the land in Tijoco from the summit to the coast, producing bananas and tomatoes for export in low-lying areas and wheat and potatoes in the highlands, shipping their products through the small Puertito of Adeje.

Further down in our road back to Tijoco Alto, we find a second vestige of the company, which are the ruins of the house of the British manager of the company.

This house is a constructive milestone in the island, because it is one of the first prefabricated houses ever built in Tenerife.

In the area there are still remains of what must have been a lovely garden.

We continue our walk down through the forest track to the gate that we avoided at the beginning of our way, reaching after more than four hours of hard walk, the place where we left the car.