From chicken cooked in a crater to lunch in a lighthouse, when it comes to crazy places to put a café, the Canary Islands take the biscuit…
Cactus juice – Lanzarote’s famous architect, César Manrique, designed the Jardín de Cactus which features over 1000 different types of everyone’s favourite desert bloom. Amidst fat fingers topped with little red flowers and thorny thongs crawling across rocks, there’s a sharp little café. Order some drinks and hope they’re not spiked.
Jardín de Cactus, Guatiza, Teguise; (+34) 928 529 397; open daily 10am – 5.45pm; entrance €5.50, children(7-12yrs) €2.75
Brotherhood bubbles – set on top of Monk’s Mountain (Montañeta del Fraile) in the north of Tenerife, the El Mirador restaurant in the former monastery of El Monasterio serves a cracking cooked breakfast with champagne while you gaze over La Orotava Valley to the ocean. It could become a habit.
El Monasterio, La Montañeta, Los Realejos, (+34) 922 340 707; open daily 9am – 1am; entrance free
Crater chicken – at El Diablo on Lanzarote‘s Fire Mountain (Timanfaya), you can watch your chicken and sausages sizzling over an active volcano using nothing but the earth’s heat to cook them. Hopefully they’ll be done quicker than the time it took to create this place, an incredible six years.
El Diablo, Timanfaya National Park; (+34) 928 173 789; open daily noon – 3.45pm; entrance to park (incl. tour) €9, children(7-12yrs) €4.50
Cave cocktails – at Jameos del Agua you can escape from Lanzarote’s glaring sun and go underground to a café and bar by a sapphire lake in an amazing cave grotto where blind, red and white crabs live. Give the seafood a miss and order a Blue Lagoon cocktail instead.
Jameos del Agua, Punta Mujeres, Haría; (+34) 928 848 020; open daily 10am – 6.30pm, restaurant & bar also opens Tues, Fri, Sat nights 7.30pm – 2am; entrance €9, children(7-12yrs) €4.50
Mountain muffins – at the foot of Spain’s highest mountain and the planet’s third largest volcano you can eat in Spain’s highest café, at the cable car station in Tenerife’s Teide National Park. Ride the cable car to above the clouds and look down on inter-island aeroplanes. It’s the ultimate high.
Cable car station, Teide National Park; (+34) 922 010 440; open daily 9am – 4pm (last cable car ascent 4pm, descent 4.50pm); entrance to café free, cable car €26, children €13
A light lunch – in a working lighthouse at El Cotillo on Fuerteventura is the Museo de la Pesca Tradicional fishing museum and its no-frills little café. You can climb the tower and watch the kiteboarders skimming the waves below you. Just don’t switch the lights off when you leave…
Museo de la Pesca Tradicional, El Cotilla; (+34) 928 858 998; open Tues-Sat 10am – 6pm; entrance €5
Andrea (Andy) Montgomery is a freelance travel writer and co-owner of Buzz Trips and The Real Tenerife series of travel websites. Published in The Telegraph, The Independent, Wexas Traveller, Thomas Cook Travel Magazine, EasyJet Traveller Magazine, you can read her latest content on Google+
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