Car hire in Los Gigantes

Can I take the car up the tracks into Teno?

No. Hire cars are permitted on paved public roads only, and that is a condition of the rental rather than a suggestion about road quality. Teno is full of graded dirt tracks that look entirely drivable, some of them leading to the sort of view that is the reason you booked the car. Driving one of them puts you outside the rental agreement, and it does so before anything has gone wrong.

The reason it matters more here than anywhere else is the parts of the car standard cover excludes: the wheels, the undercarriage, the windscreen and the interior. Those are, almost exactly, the four things a rocky track damages. So a track is where the rental agreement and the standard cover fail you in the same moment, a long way from a main road. Higher cover levels are offered on many cars, priced per car, and what a higher level adds is written on the car itself and nowhere else.

Is the Masca road open?

Sometimes, and it is the one road on Tenerife where the honest answer is a mechanism rather than a yes. Since the end of July 2026 the Cabildo has run access control on the TF-436 between nine in the morning and four in the afternoon, with control points at Las Lagunetas and Santiago del Teide and an information point at Los Pedregales. Vehicles driven by visitors for purely recreational purposes are refused. Residents, property owners, people travelling for work, small public transport and emergency services pass.

The stated reason is wildfire risk and emergency access: the TF-436 is the only way in and out of Masca, and its narrow sections make it hard for a fire appliance to pass oncoming traffic. It is explicitly temporary and dynamic, switched on and off with the risk level and with no end date announced, so the only reliable answer is the one you get on the morning you plan to drive it. Check before you set off. The bus, line 355, is the alternative the Cabildo is pushing and it has got noticeably busier since the controls began.

One more thing about that road even when it is open. Since May 2025 tour coaches in Teno are limited to ten metres and run one way, entering Masca from Buenavista and leaving toward Santiago del Teide. Practically, that means driving the TF-436 southward you travel with the coach flow, and driving it northward you meet them head-on on a road with very little room. From here it is twenty-four minutes to Masca village, and the Masca road is the one drive on this island that people either love or refuse to repeat.

Fuel and parking, and why you should fill up before arriving

There is no fuel station in Los Gigantes and none in Puerto de Santiago. The nearest is a DISA up on the TF-454 above the resort, which is a climb you will make anyway but not one you want to make on fumes at eleven at night. The habit worth forming is to fill up whenever you are already at a station in Adeje or Americas rather than planning a trip for it.

Parking is tight, as it is in any town built on a cliff. The El Mirador car park is open around the clock and has a 2.10 metre height limit, so check the car's full height before driving in. On the street, the usual Spanish colours apply: blue metered, unmarked white free, yellow forbidden, and the slope means the yellow is often there for a genuine reason.

What the car is worth from here

A great deal, because the coast to the south, the north-west towns and the Teide crater are all within an hour of here by car. The coast road south runs to Playa de las Americas in twenty-eight minutes and Costa Adeje in twenty-seven, and the quieter bays at Playa Paraiso come before either of them on the same road. Los Cristianos is thirty-three.

North is where the driving gets interesting. Icod de los Vinos is forty minutes and Garachico forty-four. The Parador in the Teide crater is fifty-four minutes from here. The south airport is fifty-one minutes and forty-four kilometres of free-flow driving, an estimate that leaves out traffic, so on a flight day check a live map and allow extra time.