Car hire in Puerto de la Cruz

Which pick-up point should I choose?

Whichever is nearest to where you are sleeping, because all of them are inside the town. The Parque Taoro option is the one to pick if you are staying up the hill above the centre, since walking down to the harbour with a suitcase and back up without a car is a poor start to a week. The bus station is the natural one if you are arriving in town by bus. The free parking point is the plainest of them and the easiest to describe to a taxi driver.

What none of them is, is an office. These are meeting places rather than counters: the same handover happens at each of them, with the licence, the card and the walk round the car. The advantage is only that you know the address in advance and can plan the morning around it.

The north is a different island to drive in

The trade winds pile cloud against the north side of Tenerife, so a morning that is bright in the south can be grey and damp here at the same hour, and if the road is wet, adjust your driving to the conditions. How much cooler it is on any given day is a thing to check rather than to assume. That is the single biggest adjustment for anybody who has driven the TF-1 all week and then comes over the top: the road here can be wet while the one you have spent the week on is dry.

One specific thing to know before you drive it. The TF-31 at Martianez runs through a false tunnel just under three hundred metres long, and it is unlit. Coming out of bright cloud into that and back out again is a real moment of blindness if you are not expecting it, and the answer is simply to slow down before you enter rather than inside. It is one instance of a wider fact about the cloud that sits on the north side, which is that the light here changes faster than the road does.

Fuel is straightforward: there are Cepsa and BP stations on the Carretera del Botanico, both well under a kilometre from Plaza del Charco. Fill up before heading south, because the run back to the south airport is a long one.

What is within reach from here

The north half of the island, easily, and the middle in a morning. La Orotava is nine minutes up the hill, and its old town is the reason a lot of people who come up here for a day end up wishing they had booked the week here. El Portillo, the northern entrance to the Teide crater, is thirty-eight minutes through pine forest, and it is a far better drive than the southern approach even though the southern one is shorter from the airport. Garachico and Icod de los Vinos are about half an hour west along the coast.

Santa Cruz is thirty minutes on the TF-5, and from there the Anaga roads start; car hire in Santa Cruz, Tenerife puts you at the near end of them. Taganana, deep in Anaga, is forty-seven minutes. The south airport, by contrast, is eighty-two minutes and ninety-seven kilometres, which is why anybody staying in Puerto and flying out of Los Rodeos should be thinking about the short hop north rather than about that drive.

Do I have to bring it back to the same point?

No. Puerto de la Cruz can be chosen as a pick-up or a drop-off independently of the other, and any one-way charge is shown with the price on each car. The most useful version of that here is starting in the south and finishing in the north, or the other way round, so the long crossing happens once rather than twice.

What has not changed is everything else about the return: the same fuel level it left with, in a condition that can actually be inspected, and the agent informed in advance of any extension rather than at the kerb. Keep the phone number you gave at booking reachable throughout the rental, because that is a condition rather than a courtesy, and in a town with more than one meeting point it is how the meeting gets moved if it needs to.