VIP Mount Teide Night Tour

A VIP Mount Teide Night Tour that you’re certain to find fascinating.

Much has been said about the spectacular landscape of the Teide National Park, but the transformation it undergoes when the sun sets is rarely mentioned. Our Mount Teide Night Tour wants to show you exactly that: the array of colours that adds beauty to the horizon at sunset and dyes the sky dark to expose 83 of the 88 constellations known to man.

On your way up, you will see how the plant life changes with the increasing altitude. The transformation in the landscape as you ascend is truly astonishing—you will feel as if you have crossed several continents in a journey of no more than one or two hours. Depending on the route you take, you will cross rural landscapes, laurel woods and pine forests. On Las Cañadas, you will find types of broom, laburnum, rosalillo de cumbre (Pterocephalus lasiospermus), and flixweed—just a few of the plants that thrive most prolifically on Tenerife’s high scrublands.

If you’re in luck, you will see tiny, harmless bats fluttering around you as the sun sets. These winged mammals have spent the day hiding in the National Park’s underground network of volcanic tunnels. The volcanic tunnels are the channels through which lava once flowed, and they are the kingdom of the troglofauna. These small invertebrates are mostly blind as they live in complete darkness, but their other sensory organs have developed great sensitivity, so they have exceptional sense of smell, touch or hearing. The majority of them are endemic to Las Cañadas, and a few are found exclusively in one particular volcanic tunnel, and nowhere else in the entire world.

A VIP Mount Teide Night Tour with sunset and astronomical observation using long-range telescopes.

Before you begin your stargazing experience, you will have toured a good part of the National Park and, from some impressive viewing point you will have seen a sunset that will remain in your memory for many years to come. In the dying light, the volcanic landscape takes on colours and hues of the utmost beauty. The spectacular, oval Las Cañadas caldera (one of the biggest volcanic calderas in the world with a perimeter of 45 km) spreads out before your eyes. In its centre stands Mount Teide, an immense stratovolcano, rising to 3,718 m. Everywhere you look, you will see all kinds of lava deposits clothing large areas of the caldera, the product of eruptions stretching back over thousands of years.

During your tour, you will see rounded volcanic cones covered in pumice stone, others covered in charcoal and ash, some turned black or a reddish colour by oxidisation, tongues of lava that hang from the sides of the volcanoes, and huge blocks of stone (in which you can see traces of gleaming obsidian) strewn haphazardly around. To tour Las Cañadas, before your exploration of the planets and galaxies, is to take a geological journey back over 180,000 years in one of Earth’s most remarkable volcanic landscapes. And if there happens to be a full moon, you will discover the most amazing lunar landscape.

Can you think of a better way of visiting Mount Teide by night than on this excursion?