Candelaria

Candelaria is a black-sand town twenty minutes south of Santa Cruz where nine bronze Guanche kings stand in a line facing the Atlantic, guarding the basilica that holds the patron saint of the whole Canary Islands. It is the archipelago's most important place of pilgrimage, and outside the two big feast days it is a perfectly ordinary Tenerife coastal town where people walk dogs along the promenade and eat fish on a Sunday.

The combination is the appeal. You get a genuinely monumental square opening straight onto the sea, a piece of pre-conquest history that is still alive rather than in a museum, a working town with normal prices, and a dark-sand coastline with sea pools. It takes half a day, costs almost nothing, and sits on the motorway between the southern resorts and the capital, which makes it one of the easiest stops on the island.

A brief word on the name, because it explains everything else. Candelaria is Spanish for Candlemas, the feast of the Purification on 2 February, and the image the town is built around shows the Virgin holding a candle. Every Canarian island has a patron; this one is patron of them all.

The story, and why it predates the conquest

The tradition holds that around 1392 — a full century before the Spanish completed the conquest of Tenerife — two Guanche shepherds found a carved wooden figure of a woman holding a child washed up on the beach at Chimisay, on this coast. Not knowing what it was, they took it to their mencey, the local Guanche king, who housed it in a cave.

What matters about that date is that the island was still entirely Guanche and still unconquered. The figure was venerated by islanders who were not Christians, in their own way, for decades before Castilian rule arrived. By the time the conquest was completed in 1496 the image was already deeply embedded in the island's religious life, and the Church absorbed the cult rather than suppressing it. Call it a miracle, or call it a very early piece of cultural diplomacy; the result is the same: the patron of the Canaries arrived before the Spanish did.

The cave nobody visits

Here is the detail almost every visitor walks past. Tucked into the rock at the southern end of the plaza, a few steps from the basilica, is the Cueva de Achbinico — also called the cave of San Blas. This is the lava cave in which the Guanches are said to have kept the image, and it was later the first place of Christian worship anywhere in the Canary Islands, in use as a chapel from the earliest years of Spanish presence on Tenerife.

It is small, dark, cut straight into the rock, and it takes ninety seconds to look at. Standing in it is a stranger and more affecting experience than the enormous church next door, because it is the actual thing rather than a commemoration of it. Look for the low doorway in the rock face beside the sea; it is easy to miss and often open when the basilica is.

The basilica

The Basílica de Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria that you see today is modern — built between the late 1940s and 1959 to a design by José Enrique Marrero Regalado, the same architect responsible for the great covered market in Santa Cruz. It is deliberately monumental: a broad stone front with a tower, a wide nave, and a painted ceiling, sized for crowds rather than for a parish.

Above the altar stands the image itself, dark-faced, richly dressed and usually surrounded by flowers and candles. It is not the original. A tidal wave in 1826 swept the historic figure out to sea along with a good deal of the town, and the statue venerated now was carved afterwards by the Tenerife sculptor Fernando Estévez. Islanders are entirely unbothered by this, which tells you something about what the place actually means to them.

The nine menceyes

The vast paved Plaza de la Patrona de Canarias in front of the basilica opens directly onto the sea, with no road and no railing between the stone and the surf — on a big day the spray comes over the wall. Along its seaward edge stand nine bronze figures, well over life size, each on its own plinth, each facing outward.

They are the menceyes, the nine Guanche kings who ruled the nine menceyatos into which Tenerife was divided at the time of the conquest — Anaga, Tegueste, Tacoronte, Taoro, Icod, Daute, Adeje, Abona and Güímar. They were sculpted by José Abad and installed in the early 1990s, replacing an earlier set, and they are armed with staffs and spears, wrapped in goatskin, with the faces of men who are not welcoming you.

They are the most photographed thing in town and the best free spectacle on this coast, especially in the hour before sunset when the light comes along the line of them. They are also, placed where they are, a rather pointed statement: the island's Christian shrine stands behind nine pagan kings who are still, four centuries later, holding the shore.

The August pilgrimage

The town's great day is 15 August, the feast of the Assumption, and the pilgrimage that leads up to it is the largest religious gathering in the Canary Islands. Tens of thousands of people walk to Candelaria — many through the night of the 14th, on foot, over the mountains from La Laguna, from Güímar, from all over the island, arriving footsore at dawn.

On the evening of the 14th the plaza hosts a re-enactment of the finding of the image, performed in costume with the shepherds, the mencey and the sea behind. The following day is mass, processions and the town at maximum capacity. There is a second, quieter feast on 2 February, Candlemas proper, which is the better one to attend if you want to see the tradition without the crush.

The beaches and the sea pools

Candelaria's coast is black volcanic sand and boulder, which is what Tenerife's shore looks like before anybody imports anything. The town beach, Playa de la Arena, is a small dark strand beside the plaza; Punta Larga to the south is larger and more open, with a promenade behind it and a car park.

The swimming needs a little judgement. This is the east-facing coast, it catches the swell, and the shelving on a dark-sand beach is steeper than it looks — the local habit is to use the tidal pools and the sheltered corners rather than fight the shore break. There are usually flags and seasonal lifeguard cover on the main beach; take them seriously. For the island's better swimming beaches, our roundup of Tenerife's beaches points you south and north.

Eating, and the pottery

The promenade and the streets behind the plaza have a good density of ordinary Canarian restaurants — grilled fish, papas arrugadas, a carafe of local wine — at prices that have not been adjusted for tourism, because the customers are largely islanders. Ask what came in that morning rather than ordering from the photographs; our guide to Canarian fish and seafood decodes the names, several of which have no English equivalent.

Candelaria also has a long association with traditional pottery made without a wheel — the pre-Hispanic technique, coiled and shaped by hand and fired in an open pit, which survived in a few Tenerife villages when it died out everywhere else in Europe. Pieces turn up in the shops around the plaza alongside a great deal of ordinary souvenir tat; look for the rough, unglazed, reddish work rather than the shiny. Our page on Canarian crafts explains what to look for.

Getting there

Candelaria sits on the TF-1 motorway roughly fifteen to twenty minutes south of Santa Cruz and under an hour from the southern resorts, with its own exits and several car parks near the seafront — which fill on Sunday afternoons and are hopeless on feast days. TITSA buses run frequently along this corridor from both the capital and the south; our guide to using the TITSA network covers the cards and the timetables.

The obvious pairing is with the pyramids at Güímar, twenty minutes further south, and with the capital in the other direction. That makes a full and varied day: stepped stone terraces of disputed origin, an unconquered virgin, nine bronze kings and a fish lunch.

Before you go

Give it two or three hours on an ordinary day. Walk the plaza first, while the light is on the statues, then the basilica, then find the cave — in that order, because the cave makes more sense once you have seen what was built on top of the story. Then eat, and walk the promenade south.

What Candelaria gives you that the resorts cannot is a straight line from the Guanche past to present-day Tenerife, standing in one square. The kings, the cave, the shrine and the crowd that still walks through the night in August are all the same story, and it is a more interesting one than anything in a museum. If the festival side of the islands appeals, our overview of Canarian festivals and carnival shows where this fits in the year.