Teide

Where is Teide?

Teide is part of the Tenerife, Canary Islands.

You will find it in: Spain.

Summit: 28.273° N, 16.639° W

The story behind it

Above the water the Teide is 3 715 metres tall, but the island it stands on is itself a volcano that begins on the sea floor, and counted from there the whole pile measures about 7 500 metres, which makes it the third tallest volcano on Earth. It sits inside the Las Cañadas caldera, a bowl roughly 16 by 9 kilometres wide whose floor already lies 2000 to 2 200 metres up. The Guanches, the first people of Tenerife, called it Echeyde and told of Guayota, a dark being in the shape of a black dog who lived inside the mountain and once stole the sun, Magec. The most recent eruption on Tenerife was in November 1909, at a vent called Chinyero on the north-western rift, not at the summit itself, whose own lava is much older. The first written record of somebody climbing it comes from 1582, and Alexander von Humboldt went up in 1799. Today a cable car carries visitors from 2 356 metres to 3 555 metres in about eight minutes, and the national park counts more than five million visitors a year. Near the top grows the Teide violet, the flowering plant that lives higher than any other in Spain.

Find it on the globe

Teide is there as a small peak with its own shape — a horn, a ridge, a volcano — standing on the surface. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.

It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.