North or south: the one question to answer first

Tenerife covers two thousand square kilometres and fits four climates inside them. Teide cuts the island in half and decides where it rains: the north-easterly trade wind hits the northern slope, unloads there and arrives dry in the south. Everything else — the price per square metre, the kind of house, who your neighbour is — follows from that geography.

What the south buys you

It buys weather certainty and it buys resale. In Costa Adeje or Palm-Mar you know what February will be like, and you know that if you want to sell in six years there is a queue. In exchange you pay twice per square metre, almost everything was built in the last twenty years, and life happens inside gated estates.

What the north buys you

It buys you a town. In Puerto de la Cruz or La Orotava there are streets, a market, people who live there all year, and houses from another century with courtyards and hundred-year-old gardens. The square metre costs half, and for the price of a southern apartment there are estates. In exchange it rains, there are misty days in summer, and the market is slower: selling takes months, not weeks.

People who choose the north rarely hesitate between north and south. They have decided before they call us.

Our advice is always the same and costs nothing: spend a week on each side before looking at a single house, and make it January or February. August lies, because in August the whole island is fine.