El Bollullo Beach

If there is a truly iconic beach of the Orotava Valley in northern Tenerife, this is the beach of El Bollullo.

El Bollullo is located on the coast of El Rincón, the area of greatest density of banana trees without greenhouse covering of northern Tenerife, perhaps the most representative region of the way the coastal strip of the Orotava Valley looked forty years ago.

El Bollullo is a northern beach. This means that it is a wild beach, a beach which is open to the sea and always buffeted by the waves. It is a beautiful deep black volcanic sand color beach. El Bollullo is the beach of my childhood, a beach that essentially, fortunately, has not changed much.

One can access to El Bollullo in two ways, either by car to the car park of the restaurant which has the same name as the beach, on the road of El Rincon, or as we propose to do, walk, starting near the Semiramis Hotel in La Paz in Puerto de la Cruz. In both cases, the visitor will face the famous stairs of the path leading to the beach.

This route from La Paz, which we propose, will take us to the beach after half an hour of a pleasant walk between beautiful banana plantations, just over the cliffs on the north coast of the island of Tenerife. It is a route which reveals the beautiful and intense blue of our Atlantic Ocean, along the inaccessible and rocky terrain of the northern island shore.

It is difficult to know for sure what this curious name of Bollullo means. However it is easy to establish connection to locations in Lower Andalusia as Bollullos Par del Condado in Huelva or the Sevillan town of Bollullos de la Mitación. According to those scholars in the field, Bollullos could be considered an “hydronim”, a topographical term linked to a water body, and apparently could be linked to water in movement, “bulla”, something linked to bubbles.

Undoubtedly, whoever has visited this spectacular beach could not agree more with the correctness of the term, in effect, the Bollullo is a place where we hardly find the calm sea. El Bollullo is synonymous with rough and untamed sea, with constant waves, with leisure on the waves.

El Bollullo is a beautiful but dangerous beach. Strong currents make swimming quite difficult if not outright impossible, but despite not being a good beach for swimming, it is an exceptional place to relax and enjoy the sea in all it´s fullness. Enjoy the sea air, salinity, iodine, the din of the waves hitting the rocks, the scorching sun on the thick clean and volcanic black sand.