Tenerife with children, from the north

The north is not the obvious place to come with children: there are no resorts with slides and no white-sand beaches. What it has instead is caves, volcanoes, butterflies and a beach tucked into a cove where the sea is calm. Here is what works, by age, and what does not.

What has an age limit

• Cueva del Viento: five years old, no exceptions. And it is two and a half hours of walking, not a stroll through a lit cave.
• The Masca ravine path: eight years old, with under-18s accompanied by an adult. It is a four-hour hard descent with a compulsory boat back.
• Teide summit: trail PNT 10 climbs to 3,714 m with gradients up to 60 %. Altitude affects children exactly as it affects adults, and the permit must be booked 56 days ahead.

The safe beach

San Marcos, in Icod. It is a shell-shaped cove, and that geometry shelters it from the heavy northern swell: by some distance the calmest option in the whole district. It has showers, toilets, restaurants on the promenade and accessible entry. Parking is under fifty spaces, so in August go early.

A plan for a grey day

In summer the north coast often wakes under low cloud. It is not a lost day: inside the Cueva del Viento the weather is irrelevant, the butterfly house is a tropical greenhouse with more than eight hundred butterflies flying free, and above a thousand metres there is almost always sun.

Walking without drama

Rambla de Castro is the walk that works best as a family: just over four flat kilometres along the cliff, with a palm grove, a viewpoint and the ruins of a water lift you can tell a story about. Mind the exposed stretches, which are not all railed.

Just in case

The public reference hospital for this whole district is in Icod de los Vinos itself, with a paediatric emergency department. For an emergency, dial 112.