Santa Cruz de Tenerife

Santa Cruz is the capital, the port and the half of the island that has nothing to do with holidays. It is a working city of a couple of hundred thousand people…Santa Cruz is the capital, the port and the half of the island that has nothing to do with holidays. It is a working city of a couple of hundred thousand people, and staying here is a genuinely different proposition from staying in a resort: you eat where residents eat, you pay resident prices, and nobody is trying to sell you an excursion.

The seafront carries the landmark concert hall, a white shell of a building that has become the island's symbol, and the cruise terminal beside it. Inland from Plaza de Espana the shopping streets run up to the covered market, which is the best single place on the island to buy Canarian cheese, wine and produce, and to eat lunch at a counter.

The city also has the island's contemporary art centre, its archaeology museum with the Guanche collection, and a park of subtropical planting that runs down towards the port.

Eight kilometres north, past the fishing village of San Andres, is Playa de las Teresitas, a long palm-lined beach of pale sand shipped in from the Sahara in the 1970s and protected by a breakwater. It is where the city goes at weekends and it is the best beach in the north of the island.

Carnival, in February, takes the city over completely for a fortnight and is the largest of its kind in Europe.