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Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

> Tenerife’s interior highlands are a moonscape, while its coastline of lava rock and sheer cliffs is pounded by surf.

That's a bit of an oversimplification. Tenerife actually has several separate climates: the south is arid, while the north gets more rainfall and has the typical laurel forests. And in the middle the vegetation depends on the height of the mountains - at up to 3715 m, you won't have a lot anymore of course. Not that this has anything to do with artificial beaches, but the article might make you think that anything green on Tenerife is also artificial...

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Obviously the author has never been in Tenerife.

Moonscape. Yeah. Sure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtNM5K4gW88

There are a fair quote of humid forests here. Many different ecosystems

That said, what makes interesting Las Teresitas beach is that is yellow sand. Beaches in Tenerife are volcanic, and lava produces a sand that is very clean, but satin black. Sunbathing there is a strange feeling, like being in a giant ashtray. Black sand is also superhot.

Las Teresitas are a man-made beach using the sand that most people identify as a typical beach (made from white coral sand and shells, so people expects yellow). Either angelfishes find more comfortable to mimick and hide in that tone or is the lack of trawlers (destroying an expensive touristic beach mixing the sand with the black bottom is not allowed, obviously).

That video reminds me of when we walked down the Camino de Jinama on El Hierro as part of a longer walk - at the top of the path it was very cloudy and wet and as you descend it gets drier and when we walked down to the sea the next day it was very hot, dry and volcanic.

Amazing islands!

Can't fall to remember the mythic advertising for Gopro in Gran Canaria featuring Danny MacAskill. Five minutes of awesomeness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GL0rbxB9Lqg

Wow

Yeah I wondered if they're confusing Tenerife and Lanzarote...

Or Fuerteventura… it is also as dry.

Funny to read this thread shortly after the short hike to Calderon Hondo volcano.

FV also has natural white sand beaches and giant sand dunes in Corralejo, but I also love black sand beaches. In Tenerife i went to one that was as black as charcoal, kids loved rolling in the sand.

Weird. I like black sand. I spend a lot of time on La Gomera (closest island to Tenerife, about 30 km away) and actually love the sand there. There's also basically nothing but sand: no shells, few rocks, no random fish carcasses (presumably this is what you mean by "clean"). I'm usually there in the middle of winter (25º C-ish) when the sand being warm is a plus.

Usually there aren't a ton of fish around the islands because they're volcanoes: the mountain extends down into the water too, and there's not much of a shelf of shallow water around the islands. It gets deep fast. I wonder if something in dumping the sand also extended the amount of shallow water there.

> in the middle the vegetation depends on the height of the mountains

So you might say that the parts in the middle at high altitudes (i.e. the interior highlands) have little vegetation?

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