Tenerife in December
Mild days on the coast, snow on Teide, and a Christmas that runs right through to the Three Kings on 5 January.
The weather
- Average high
- 23°C
- Average low
- 16°C
- Rain
- 30 mm, about 4 days
- Sunshine
- About 6 hours a day
Tenerife South airport, AEMET averages 1981 to 2010.
In the south the average high is about 23 degrees and nights are around 16. It's the cooler end of the year here, but most people from the UK would call it a very good spring day.
Up on Teide it's a different story. Frost and snow are common at the summit in winter, and on some days you can be in the snow in the morning and on a south coast beach in the afternoon.
The sea is cooling from its autumn high of about 23 degrees towards about 18 in late winter, so a December swim is fresh but very doable.
Most of the island's rain falls between November and March, and even then there isn't much: Santa Cruz gets only a little over 200 millimetres in a whole year. Winter is also when calima is most likely, the hazy, dusty air that blows over from the Sahara and can hang around for a few days.
Christmas on the island
Towns switch their Christmas lights on from late November, with Santa Cruz, La Orotava and La Laguna usually among the first.
Nativity scenes, called belenes, are the big Christmas tradition here. Towns hold contests and set out routes so you can walk round and see them. La Orotava puts up a traditional one in its town hall square from 8 December.
Christmas doesn't stop at New Year. The season ends with the Three Kings parades on 5 January, and Spanish children traditionally get their presents the next morning.
Dates for the diary
- 5 DecemberIn Los Realejos, the figure of the Immaculate Conception is lowered from its altar on a system of rails.
- 6 DecemberConstitution Day. In 2026 it falls on a Sunday, and the Canary Islands haven't moved it to the Monday, so 7 December is a normal working day here. Los Silos holds its International Storytelling Festival around it.
- 8 DecemberImmaculate Conception, another public holiday. In La Laguna the mayor hands the staff of office to the parish priest, because the Virgin has been the city's honorary mayor since 1954. La Orotava's nativity scene opens.
- Mid-DecemberThe Geminid meteor shower. On a clear night, the high ground of Las Cañadas del Teide is one of the best places to watch it.
- 24 DecemberEl Tanque stages its Auto Sacramental de Nochebuena, a Christmas Eve nativity play that may go back to the late 1800s and is among the oldest in Spain.
- 25 DecemberChristmas Day, a public holiday. The Tenerife Symphony Orchestra gives its Christmas concert at the Dársena de Los Llanos in the port of Santa Cruz, and at nightfall the village of Tigaiga in Los Realejos puts on a living nativity, a tradition more than 50 years old.
- 31 DecemberLa Laguna's San Silvestre, a New Year's Eve fun run through the streets, held every year since 1982.
Times and details can change from year to year, so check with the town hall before you set off. A public holiday that falls on a Sunday can sometimes move to the Monday.
Christmas food
Look out for truchas, Canarian Christmas pastries usually filled with sweet potato or angel hair jam. Kid goat, called baifo here, is a favourite for the Christmas meal.
It's guachinche season too. These simple places, where local growers sell their own wine with home cooking, traditionally open on San Andrés Day, 30 November, and close when the wine runs out.
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