Teide National Park

Where it sits. Teide National Park fills the high centre of Tenerife, 18,990 hectares of caldera floor, lava field and volcanic cone in the municipality of La Orotava, reached by mountain roads that climb through pine forest from every coast of the island. Mount Teide itself tops out at about 3,715 metres, the highest point in Spain and the third-tallest volcanic structure on earth measured from its base on the ocean floor, some 7,500 metres below. Pico Viejo, the second-highest peak in the Canaries at 3,135 metres, stands beside it with a crater 800 metres across. Both rise from Las Cañadas, a caldera roughly 16 kilometres wide whose southern wall forms a curved cliff several hundred metres high. UNESCO inscribed the park as a World Heritage Site on 28 June 2007.

What you are looking at. The floor of the caldera is a museum of volcanic surfaces laid side by side: black aa lava with a broken clinker crust, smoother pahoehoe ropes, pumice plains the colour of bone, and obsidian flows from the eruption of Las Narices del Teide in 1798, which is still visibly raw. The Roques de García, a line of eroded dykes standing free on the caldera floor, includes the Roque Cinchado, the wind-cut rock that appeared on the old thousand-peseta note. The rock colours shift through the day from grey to red to violet, and the light at either end of the day is the reason photographers keep coming back. NASA and the European Space Agency have both used the park as a Mars analogue for testing instruments, which tells you most of what you need to know about how the ground looks.

Life at altitude. Canary Island pine forest covers the flanks from about 1,000 to 2,100 metres, with a timberline a full kilometre lower than continental mountains at the same latitude. Above it, 168 species of vascular plant survive, 33 of them found only on Tenerife: the Teide white broom that covers the slopes in cream and pink flower in late May and June, the Canary Island wallflower, and above all the tajinaste rojo, Echium wildpretii, a red flowering spike up to three metres tall that appears for a few weeks in May and June. The Teide violet grows right to the summit and is the highest flowering plant in Spain. Bird life includes the endemic blue chaffinch, Berthelot's pipit and the wild Atlantic canary; the only native mammals are bats. For the Guanches, the island's Amazigh inhabitants before the Castilian conquest, the mountain was Echeyde, the gateway to hell, and archaeological sites in the park mark it as a place of worship.

On screen. Teide's Martian geology has made it a standing double for other worlds and other times. Clash of the Titans (2010) filmed a substantial part of its Greek mythic landscape here, using the park as its primary Canary Islands location alongside the dunes of Maspalomas on Gran Canaria and Timanfaya on Lanzarote. The island is equally central to the action-franchise map: Fast and Furious 6 (2013) shot on Tenerife and Gran Canaria between July and December 2012, and its runway climax, the sequence with the cargo plane that seems never to reach the end of the tarmac, was staged along a three-kilometre stretch of Tenerife highway lined with holiday resorts that had to be digitally erased to create an empty airbase. The Canary Islands' tax rebate scheme is why so many big-budget units keep landing here.

Getting up and getting to the top. The TF-21 climbs from La Orotava in the north and from Vilaflor in the south; the TF-24 comes over the Corona Forestal from La Laguna. A cable car runs from 2,356 metres to La Rambleta at 3,555 metres in eight minutes. Reaching the actual crater rim above that requires a free permit booked well in advance, capped at a few hundred people a day, or a night in the Altavista refuge at 3,260 metres and a pre-dawn climb. The Montaña Blanca trail is the classic walking route; Roques de García is the short circuit most visitors do.

Timing. The park is open year round, but the mountain makes its own weather. Winter brings snow that can close the TF-21 for days and coats the cone in white above a sea of cloud, which is the most photographed condition of all. Spring, especially May and June, gives flowering broom and tajinaste. Summer is hot and dusty at midday and the summit permit slots go fastest. Nights are cold in every month, the observatory at Izaña records around 3,500 hours of sunshine a year, and the darkness above 2,000 metres is good enough that stargazing tours run most clear evenings.