Spain
Writing about the real Tenerife
It’s sixteen years since we set up our first website to share what we were discovering about the real Tenerife. The website was an afterthought, designed to accompany a driving guide to some of our […]
The Canary Islands
Portugal
How living abroad has changed us
The wounds are still gaping red, raw, and very sore. After years of living abroad, it’s too painful for me to talk about Brexit at the moment. No, painful is not the right word at […]
Europe
The case against Spanish desserts
The issue is not one of whether these Spanish desserts are good or bad in their own right. It’s only by comparison with the desserts of other nationalities that you can really judge just how good a dish is… […]
Europe
Inside a cave house on Tenerife
Ever since we first heard about the troglodyte village of Chinamada in the Anaga region on Tenerife we desperately wanted to see what the interior of the cave houses looked like. […]
Austria
Europe’s just desserts, ten standout puddings
My least favourite part of a meal is dessert… unless there is something which awakens the sweet-toothed child that slumbers within. And there regularly is, no matter where we travel around Europe. […]
Living Abroad
Of postal delivery and speaking another language
The Portuguese, like the Spanish, are complimentary when you make an effort, telling us we can speak it well when we rattle of a few stock phrases when we’re appalling. […]
The Canary Islands
Do people know they’re in a purpose-built resort?
After a couple of days in a purpose-built resort I get twitchy, and eager to leave. Their rhythm is out of kilter. In high season there are no weekends as such, each day is ground-hog Saturday night. […]
Europe
Travel and weather, beyond the sun and rain
Ever since we took up walking in earnest, and starting monitoring weather conditions and their after effects, we’ve learned things about the weather we would once never had considered for a second. […]
Europe
Emrelishment, a tale of travel, food and drink preparation
In the middle of the 20th cent in the cool and shady interior of the Imperial, an unexceptional bar next to the bullring in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, a regular known to the waiting staff as ‘El Barraco’ grabs a seat at the bar’s counter mid-morning and orders his favourite bocadillo […]
Europe
Showcasing the best of the real Tenerife
Earlier in the year we spent time revamping Slow Travel holidays on both Tenerife and La Palma in the Canary Islands. We passed the summer writing up guides to accompany them, hoping those who followed in our footsteps would enjoy the journey as much as we had […]
Algarve
Where to go warm winter walking in Europe
This is the time of year when there are regular travel articles about warm winter walking. Generally they’ll feature the same handful of locations. […]
Europe
Ten things Tenerife taught us about living and working abroad
This is how the discussion went: “Let’s give up everything an move to Totnes.” “Why not go the whole nine yards and move abroad… somewhere like Sri Lanka.” And then we ended up in the destination at the end of many discerning travellers’ noses – Tenerife. […]
El Hierro
The other Canary Islands, the green ones
Social media can often be a forum full of people spouting things they think they know and doing so with unshakeable, definitive confidence. An example of this caught my eye the other morning in relation to a comment on a sponsored post about the Canary Islands. […]
Europe
In a valley on La Gomera
Jo will be gutted when I tell her Benedict Allen almost chose La Gomera as a place to lay his dusty, old wide-brimmed hat for a while. She’ll be furious when I tell her why. […]
Europe
Learning to live with eating seasonal fruit and vegetables
Travelling around rural parts of Europe we regularly spot roadside fruit and veg stalls, a good way of seeing what are the seasonal ‘in things’ in any destination. […]