Teide sunset photoshoot: a practical guide

A photoshoot on Teide is made in the caldera at about 2,100 metres, not on the summit, and it works in two windows: the first hour of light, or the last hour of sun plus the half-hour after it. Book the sunset if you are staying on the south coast and do not want to leave at five in the morning; book the sunrise if you want the Roques de García to yourselves. Either way, bring a coat — it is around 15 degrees colder up there than on the beach you drove from.

The summit is not where the photograph is

Teide is 3,715 metres high. The cable car goes to 3,555 metres when the wind allows it, and the last two hundred metres to the crater need a separate free permit, applied for weeks ahead, with a fixed time slot. People assume the session happens up there. It does not, and it should not: the top is wind, a timed ascent and a slope nobody wants to stand still on.

The photographs are made in Las Cañadas, the caldera at the volcano's foot. It sits above the island's cloud layer, which forms at about 1,200 metres on the northern side, so on most mornings you are standing on an ochre and black lava desert with a floor of white below you. There is no haze at that altitude, and the shadows come out properly blue because the only fill light is sky. That is the look people mean when they search for a Teide photoshoot, and it needs a car, not a cable car.

The spots, in the order we would use them

Roques de García and Roque Cinchado

The rock formations beside the Parador, with the volcano standing directly behind them. This is the frame, and the reason it is the frame is that the rocks give you a foreground at human scale against a mountain that has none. The first hour of light is the best one here. By mid-morning the car park fills with coaches; at sunrise it is empty.

Llano de Ucanca, from the Mirador de La Ruleta

The flat plain below the Roques, seen from the viewpoint in the same car park. Pale ground, dark walls of the caldera behind it, and the one place on the mountain with a wide, level horizon. It is two minutes on foot from the Roques, which is why the two are the obvious pair for a ninety-minute session: two locations, walked rather than driven.

Minas de San José

A field of pale pumice beside the TF-21 between the Parador and El Portillo, and the nearest thing on the island to a lunar surface. It is the opposite of a black beach: the ground throws light back up into faces, which is flattering after sunset and far too bright at noon.

Mirador de Samara and the Narices del Teide

On the TF-38, the road that climbs from the west coast. Black lava flows from the flank of Pico Viejo, cinder cones and scattered pines. Fewer people than anywhere else in the park, and the right side of the mountain for the last light of the day.

Mirador de Chipeque

On the TF-24, the ridge road from La Laguna. On most summer mornings it looks down on the cloud sea with Teide behind a pine forest. It is a viewpoint rather than a session location — a layby and a railing — but it is the best place to see the cloud from above on the way up.

Off the mountain: Benijo and La Laguna

For a honeymoon with two sessions, the second one belongs in the north. Playa de Benijo is black sand with sea stacks, facing west, best at low tide in the hour before sunset. La Laguna is a UNESCO colonial town painted pistachio, ox-blood and indigo, and it is often in cloud when the coast is in sun, which is exactly what those colours need.

Sunset or sunrise

Tenerife runs an hour behind the peninsula, so the times are earlier than a Madrid reader expects. The sun sets at about nine in the evening in late June and about a quarter past six in December; it rises at about ten past seven in June and about eight in December.

A sunset session means the last hour of sun on the caldera floor and then twenty to thirty minutes after it, which is when the sky over the caldera does its best work. It also means driving down a mountain road in the dark, and the descent takes as long as the climb. A sunrise session means leaving the south coast well over an hour before first light; the only way round that is a night at the Parador, the one hotel inside the caldera.

Our view: sunrise gives you the better light and an empty park, sunset gives you a lie-in and warmer colour. Couples on a short trip mostly choose the sunset, and it is a perfectly good choice as long as they arrive an hour before the sun goes, not ten minutes.

Cold, altitude and sun

• Cold. Around 15 degrees below the coast. In winter at sunrise it is regularly below freezing, with wind on top. People drive up from a 24-degree beach in a t-shirt and last about eleven minutes. Anything you want to wear in the photographs travels in the car and goes on at the location.
• Sun. The air is thinner and the light is harder on skin than it looks. Sunscreen, even at sunset.
• Altitude. At 2,100 metres most people notice nothing beyond breathlessness on a slope. The cable car's upper station is a different matter, and anyone with a heart or breathing condition should check before going up.
• Roads. The caldera is reached by the TF-21 from La Orotava or from Vilaflor, the TF-24 from La Laguna and the TF-38 from the west coast. Allow roughly an hour each way from the southern resorts. Between December and March the road is closed for ice a handful of days a year, and calima — Saharan dust — closes the mountain roads a few times a year in any season. Have a second date.

When to come

There is barely a season on Tenerife — 21 degrees on the coast in January, 28 in August — but the mountain changes. From May to September the cloud sea is at its most reliable. From December to March you get the occasional clear Atlantic day when La Palma and La Gomera are both visible, and sometimes snow on the cone above a subtropical coastline, which is worth arranging a morning around if the road is open. The hour-by-hour light guide explains why the rest of Spain is harder than this.

The park's rules

Teide is a national park and behaves like one. Stay on marked paths; the rocks are not for climbing. Take nothing — not a stone. Drones are not permitted. Visiting and photographing as a visitor is free; commercial and professional productions need written authorisation from the park, applied for weeks ahead. The full picture, and where Teide sits alongside the Alhambra and the Alcázar, is in the permits guide.

What it costs with Albor

• [Honeymoon session in Tenerife](/services/honeymoon/tenerife) — from €260, 90 minutes, 45 edited photographs, sunrise or last light, gallery within 48 hours so you have them before you fly home.
• [Couple session in Tenerife](/services/couple/tenerife) — from €200, 90 minutes, 40 edited photographs, two locations on foot.
• [Proposal in Tenerife](/services/proposal/tenerife) — from €260, 60 minutes, 35 photographs, with the spot and a signal agreed in advance. The Roques at sunrise are about as private as a public place gets.

Those are floor prices, for a weekday outside August; the pricing page explains what moves them, and the booking form returns the real figure for your date. If you have not decided between the mountain and the coast, the Tenerife page sets out both halves of the island.

What we would book

Late spring, a weekday, the first full day of the trip. Sunset at the Roques de García and the Llano de Ucanca, with the coats in the boot and a second evening held in reserve in case of calima. And if there is a second session, forty minutes north on black sand rather than another hour on the mountain.