🦅 Who Lives on This Vertical Wall?

From a distance, Los Gigantes may look like an enormous, almost lifeless wall of rock. In fact, its cracks, rocky ledges and inaccessible sections provide shelter for animals that thrive here precisely because the cliffs are so difficult to reach. The entire area lies within Teno Rural Park and is an important refuge for many protected species.

One of the most fascinating is the osprey – known in the Canary Islands as the guincho. This large bird of prey is closely associated with the sea and feeds almost exclusively on fish. It can circle above the water, spot its prey and then plunge down to seize it in its talons. On Tenerife, it is one of the island’s rarest birds of prey, and the inaccessible cliffs of Teno are among its most important habitats. Studies carried out along Tenerife’s coast have recorded ospreys in the Los Gigantes area.

The cliffs are also home to Barbary falcons (halcón tagarote) and Canary Islands ravens. Tenerife’s official tourism website lists Los Gigantes as an interesting location for birdwatchers precisely because of these threatened species.

There is another inhabitant hiding among the rocks that you are unlikely even to notice during an ordinary boat trip – the Tenerife giant lizard (Gallotia intermedia). For a long time, the species was thought to be extinct, until living individuals were discovered in the Teno Massif towards the end of the 20th century. The inaccessible rocky ledges of Los Gigantes are among its refuges.

💡 The paradox of Los Gigantes is that what makes life difficult for humans helps animals survive. Vertical cliffs that are difficult to reach provide a natural refuge from some of the threats found in more accessible places.

👀 If you see a large bird circling above the ocean or perched high on a rocky ledge during your boat trip, take a closer look. You may be looking at a guincho – one of Tenerife’s rarest winged inhabitants. Keeping your distance is particularly important during the breeding season; conservation materials relating to Los Gigantes identify February to August as the period when ospreys should not be disturbed.

🚤 From the Land or from the Ocean?

Los Gigantes are worth seeing from both perspectives, because each reveals something completely different. From the land, you can best appreciate how the enormous rock wall forms part of Tenerife’s western coastline. From the ocean, however, you can see what is almost impossible to grasp from the viewpoints – the cliffs’ true height and geological structure.

One of the best-known viewpoints on land is Mirador de Archipenque, high above Puerto de Santiago. From here, you see the cliffs from a distance, together with the ocean and the buildings at their base. It is a particularly good place to notice the contrast between the small houses and boats and the immense Teno Massif. Punta de Teno offers a different perspective – from there, you look along the coastline towards Los Gigantes from the north-western end of the massif.

But if you have to choose only one way to see the cliffs, a boat trip offers a completely different experience. The boat travels beneath a wall that rises almost directly from the Atlantic. Only then do the features I described earlier become truly visible: successive layers of solidified lava, vertical dykes cutting through the rock, the mouths of barrancos and the immense scale of cliffs beside which even a sizeable boat looks like a toy.

A boat trip also allows you to see places that are virtually inaccessible from the land. One of the most distinctive is the bay at the mouth of Barranco de Masca. This is where the famous Masca Gorge reaches the sea, with a small beach almost enclosed between the ocean and the towering walls of Teno.

💡 The best experience, therefore, comes from combining both perspectives. First, see Los Gigantes from above – this will help you understand their location and the scale of the entire coastline. Then head out onto the ocean and look at the same wall from below. What was a panorama only moments before suddenly becomes a rock face rising hundreds of metres above your head.

🗺️ I leave the practical details for the guidebook. In Tenerife with Achamán, I have marked the best viewpoints for seeing Los Gigantes on the interactive map and explain where to take a boat from, what types of trips are available and how to combine seeing the cliffs from the sea with exploring this part of Tenerife.

👀 Don’t Miss

🌊 Layers of ancient lava – look at the cliff faces as an enormous cross-section through the Teno Massif. Each layer records another stage in its volcanic history.

🪨 Dykes cutting through the cliffs – look for vertical and diagonal bands crossing the rock layers. These are solidified pathways through which magma once travelled inside the massif.

🚤 Boats at the foot of Los Gigantes – find a small boat and compare it with the rock wall. Only then can you truly appreciate what several hundred metres of height actually means.

🏞️ The mouths of the barrancos – notice the deep ravines cutting through the cliffs towards the ocean. The mouth of Barranco de Masca is particularly spectacular.

🦅 Rocky ledges – look for birds circling close to the cliff faces. With a little luck, you may spot an osprey – the guincho – one of Tenerife’s rarest birds of prey.

🐋 The ocean – do not look only at the cliffs. These waters are home year-round to short-finned pilot whales and bottlenose dolphins, among other species, so keep an eye on the surface of the sea as well.

🌅 Los Gigantes from two perspectives – see the cliffs from at least one viewpoint on land and, if you can, from the ocean as well. They are almost two completely different landscapes.

🧭 Continue Exploring Tenerife

🌄 Masca
Discover a village hidden in the Teno Massif and find out how the landscape of the surrounding barrancos was formed.

👉 Discover Masca

🌿 Teno Rural Park
Los Gigantes are just one face of one of the oldest parts of Tenerife. Discover what lies deeper within the Teno Massif.
👉 Explore Teno

🌋 Teide
Los Gigantes are older than Teide. Discover how, much later, the volcano that now dominates Tenerife rose in the centre of the island.
👉 Explore Teide

🗺️ Want to see more? Discover all the places and stories on the → Tenerife page

👣 Did the Guanches Really Call Them the Wall of Hell?

One of the most evocative stories about Tenerife’s ancient inhabitants is associated with Los Gigantes. According to this story, the Guanches called the enormous cliffs the Muralla del Infierno – the Wall of Hell. The rock wall was said to mark the boundary of their world, and some modern versions of the story even claim that they believed the waters of the Atlantic at its foot were bottomless.

For a moment, try to forget the Tenerife of today. There is no Puerto de Santiago, no harbour, no viewpoints and no boats full of tourists. In front of you rises a dark wall of rock, in places several hundred metres high. Deep barrancos make it difficult to reach from the land, while sheer cliffs plunge directly into the ocean. It is not difficult to imagine such a place inspiring stories about the edge of the known world.

But did the Guanches really see Los Gigantes in this way? This is where history begins to merge with legend. Even Tenerife’s official tourism website states today that the Guanches called the cliffs Muralla del Infierno. Stories about the “end of the world” and bottomless waters are also repeated in tourism materials. I have not, however, been able to find an early chronicle confirming these stories in this form.

There is, however, an interesting clue. An academic publication from the University of La Laguna mentions an old name for the cliffs, Muralla del Diablo – the Devil’s Wall. The authors point out that in the Canary Islands, dangerous and inaccessible places – cliffs, rocks, caves and ravines – were later sometimes associated with the devil and hell. Such names already belonged to a Christian way of describing the landscape. A good example is Barranco del Infierno – the Ravine of Hell.

And this raises the most interesting question. Infierno and diablo are Spanish words belonging to the Christian world, so in this form they could not have been the original names used by the Guanches. Did the Spanish translate an earlier Guanche name for the cliffs in this way? Was there an older story about the edge of the world that later acquired a Christian name? Or did the entire story arise only after the conquest of Tenerife? For now, we simply cannot say.

📖 Legend or History?

I would therefore not treat the stories of the Wall of Hell, the end of the world and the bottomless ocean as proven Guanche beliefs. But nor would I remove them from the story of Los Gigantes altogether. Legends change over the centuries, merge with later ideas and acquire new names. Sometimes that is precisely why tracing their origins is so difficult.

👀 When you see Los Gigantes from the ocean, try for a moment to look at them through the eyes of someone who lived here centuries ago. Wherever history ends and legend begins, it is easy to understand why these particular cliffs became the subject of such a story.

🐋 Why Do So Many Whale- and Dolphin-Watching Trips Depart from Here?

A boat trip beneath Los Gigantes often has two purposes. On the one hand, it allows you to see the cliffs from the ocean; on the other, it gives you the chance to encounter dolphins and whales. This is no coincidence. Along Tenerife’s western and south-western coast lies the Teno-Rasca Marine Strip – a protected marine area covering almost 70,000 hectares.

Most importantly, not all the animals found here are simply visitors passing the island. The waters off south-western Tenerife are home to resident populations of bottlenose dolphins and short-finned pilot whales. They can be seen throughout the year.

Why here? Tenerife’s location and topography mean that its south-western waters are largely sheltered from the trade winds, while the animals find suitable conditions and food here. Official Turismo de Tenerife materials cite the abundance of food, calmer waters and favourable climatic conditions as reasons for the presence of resident cetacean populations.

The short-finned pilot whale (Globicephala macrorhynchus) is particularly interesting. Although its English name includes the word “whale”, biologically it belongs to the dolphin family. Adults can grow to more than 5 metres in length and weigh 1–2 tonnes. The pilot whale is one of the cetaceans most frequently seen on boat trips off the coast of Tenerife.

This does not mean, however, that you will see animals on every trip. This is not an aquarium – dolphins and pilot whales live here in the wild. In addition to the resident species, other cetaceans pass through these waters, so at different times you may also encounter species such as spotted dolphins, common dolphins and larger whales. Official sources report more than 20 species observed in this part of the ocean.

💙 Worth knowing: if you want to combine seeing Los Gigantes with whale and dolphin watching, choose a legally operating boat with the required authorisation for commercial cetacean-watching activities. Regulations specify, among other things, how boats should behave around the animals so as not to disturb them.

🪨 Vertical Lines on the Cliffs – What Are You Actually Looking At?

When you look closely at Los Gigantes, you will notice that the horizontal layers of ancient lava flows are sometimes cut by vertical or diagonal bands of rock. They look a little like enormous lines drawn across the cliff face. These are volcanic dykes – solidified traces of the ancient pathways once taken by magma. There are a great many of them in the Teno Massif.

How did they form? Imagine magma inside a volcanic massif searching for a way towards the surface. When a crack opens in the rock, magma can be forced into it. Sometimes it reaches the surface and feeds an eruption; at other times it solidifies underground, filling the fracture. This is how a dyke is formed.

Millions of years ago, these structures could not be seen – they were hidden inside the Teno Massif. Only later did erosion remove enormous quantities of the surrounding rock and cut so deeply into the ancient volcanic massif that its internal structures were exposed. Los Gigantes therefore allow you to see something that would normally remain hidden deep inside a volcano.

💡 You can think of dykes as solidified pipes that once carried magma. They are not, however, empty tunnels. They are fractures that were filled with magma, which then solidified inside them to form bands of solid rock.

Interestingly, not all of these “lines” look the same. The Spanish Geological Survey describes both dykes and sills at Los Gigantes – magma intrusions that run more closely parallel to the existing rock layers.

📏 Are They Really 600 Metres High?

Yes – but not along their entire length. Tenerife’s official tourism website states that Los Gigantes reach around 600 metres above sea level in some places. The Spanish Geological Survey, meanwhile, describes the main section of the cliffs as walls around 200–500 metres high. There is no contradiction here: Los Gigantes form a long and highly irregular wall whose height varies from place to place.

Six hundred metres is difficult to imagine until you have something to compare it with. It is roughly the height of two Palaces of Culture stacked one on top of the other. And yet, when you look at the cliffs from a distance, their immense scale can almost disappear – the wall is so vast that your eyes have little to compare it with.

That is why the best “measuring sticks” are the boats sailing at the foot of Los Gigantes. From a viewpoint, they look like tiny white dots. From the deck of a boat, the sense of scale becomes even more striking: only then do you realise how small a person is beside a rock wall rising almost vertically from the ocean. Tenerife’s official tourism website recommends seeing the cliffs from the sea as one of the best ways to appreciate their true height.

💡 Did You Know...?

Los Gigantes do not end at the surface of the Atlantic. The rock continues beneath the water, although the official description indicates that the seabed at the foot of the cliffs is around 30 metres deep in some places.

🌋 How Did Lava Create a Wall Hundreds of Metres High?

Los Gigantes were not formed during a single gigantic eruption. This wall was built piece by piece. Successive eruptions produced lava that flowed down the slopes of the ancient Teno Massif, solidified and was later covered by new flows. The process was repeated many times until an enormous pile of volcanic rock had formed.

Look at the cliffs from the ocean. Instead of one solid mass of rock, you will see hundreds of layers stacked one on top of another. In the oldest part of Los Gigantes, individual lava flows are often less than a metre thick, with layers of scoria and other volcanic material ejected during eruptions between them. Together, they record successive stages in the formation of the ancient volcanic massif.

But the accumulation of lava alone would not have created Los Gigantes in the form we see today. First, volcanoes built the land; then its destruction began. Over millions of years, water flowing through deep barrancos cut into the massif, gravity took its toll, and the Atlantic eroded the rocks along the coast. In Tenerife’s old massifs, such as Teno, these erosional features – ravines and cliffs – are now among the most distinctive elements of the landscape.

🌊 You could therefore say that Los Gigantes have two creators. Volcanoes built the enormous massif from successive layers of lava, while erosion exposed its interior and shaped the coastline into a vast wall.

👀 Look closely: when you see Los Gigantes from a boat, do not focus only on the height of the cliffs. Look for the horizontal layers stacked one above another. They are the remains of successive eruptions that took place millions of years ago. In a moment, we will also see lines running in a completely different direction – and they tell another part of Teno’s story.

🌊 Who “Cut Off” Los Gigantes?

If successive eruptions built the Teno Massif layer by layer, where did the almost vertical wall that now plunges into the ocean come from? Los Gigantes were not “cut off” in a single catastrophic event. Their present shape is primarily the result of erosion acting over a very long period of time.

The Atlantic played the most important role. For thousands and millions of years, waves struck the base of the ancient massif, exploited cracks in the rock and gradually undercut it. When the lower part of the cliff lost its support, sections of the rock face collapsed under their own weight. The sea removed some of the debris and the whole process could begin again. In this way, the cliff line gradually retreated inland. This process of marine erosion is also well documented on the ancient cliffs of northern Teno.

But the ocean did not work alone. From above, water flowing down the slopes cut into the massif. It entered cracks, carried away loose material and, over a very long period of time, deepened the barrancos – ravines that now cut through Teno from the mountains all the way to the sea. This is why the landscape of this part of the island consists of both enormous cliffs and deep ravines running towards the ocean.

💡 Imagine, then, an ancient Teno Massif larger than the one you see today. Its western edge did not end exactly where Los Gigantes now stand. Over a very long period, the Atlantic took away successive sections of rock, while erosion from the landward side cut into the remaining massif.

The process continues today. The Spanish Geological Survey classifies Los Gigantes as an active sea cliff. This does not, of course, mean that you will see the ocean moving the rock wall during a boat trip. On a human timescale, the changes are usually small, but on a geological timescale the cliffs continue to be reshaped by the sea, landslides and rockfalls.

👀 Look at the base of the cliffs. From a boat, you can clearly see places where the rock plunges almost vertically into the ocean. It is here, where land meets the Atlantic, that a slow struggle has been taking place for millions of years – the very process that has given Los Gigantes their spectacular appearance today.

🌊 Los Gigantes – Where Tenerife Drops into the Ocean

The name Los Gigantes – the Giants – is no exaggeration. On the west coast of Tenerife, the land ends in an almost vertical wall that stretches for kilometres along the Atlantic. At their highest points, the cliffs rise to around 600 metres above sea level. It is only when a boat appears at their base that you can truly appreciate the scale of this immense wall.

Los Gigantes form the western edge of the Teno Massif, one of the oldest parts of Tenerife. They were not created by a single eruption, nor are they the work of a single volcano. What you see today is the result of a very long history of first building and then destroying this part of the island. Successive eruptions added layer upon layer of volcanic material, while over time water, gravity and, above all, the Atlantic began cutting into them and taking away the island piece by piece.

That is why Los Gigantes are worth seeing as more than just a spectacular panorama. This enormous wall is like an exposed section through the interior of ancient Tenerife. You can see layers of rock formed during successive eruptions, deep barrancos cutting through the massif, and dark bands running through the rock – traces of the pathways through which magma once travelled.

💡 And this is precisely why a boat trip beneath Los Gigantes is about more than taking a beautiful photograph. From ocean level, you can look at the cliffs as an enormous cross-section through one of the oldest parts of the island. In a moment, we will see how this part of Tenerife was formed and why its coastline looks the way it does today.

🏝️ Cliffs Older Than Teide

Looking at Los Gigantes, it is easy to imagine that you are seeing part of the same volcanic world to which Teide belongs. In fact, the story of these rocks began millions of years earlier.

Los Gigantes are part of the Teno Massif, one of the three oldest parts of present-day Tenerife. The others are Anaga in the north-east and Roque del Conde in the south. Before the island took on the shape we know today, enormous volcanic massifs were growing in different parts of the ocean. Teno was one of them.

Most of the Teno Massif was built around 6 million years ago. Eruption after eruption, lava flow after lava flow, volcanic material accumulated in layers, gradually creating an enormous volcanic structure. Studies of the rocks show that the main stage of its formation was surprisingly short on a geological timescale – a large part of the massif may have formed around 6.4–6.0 million years ago.

Interestingly, for much of its history Teno was not yet part of a single island of Tenerife. It was a separate volcanic massif rising from the Atlantic. Only later did volcanic activity fill the spaces between the old massifs, gradually joining them together to form the island.

Teide appeared much later in this story. In the central part of the island, the development of the great Las Cañadas volcanic complex began more than 3 million years ago, while the Teide–Pico Viejo system itself represents an even younger chapter in Tenerife’s volcanic history.

💡 Did You Know...? When you look at Los Gigantes from a boat, you are looking at rocks that belong to one of the oldest chapters in Tenerife’s history. Teno existed before Teide appeared in the island’s landscape.

Los Gigantes – Tenerife’s Giant Cliffs

You stand above the ocean looking at an almost vertical wall that in places rises to around 600 metres. Los Gigantes are impressive simply because of their sheer scale. But once you know what you are looking at, they become even more fascinating.

These enormous cliffs are part of the Teno Massif – one of the oldest parts of Tenerife. In their rock faces, you can see successive layers of volcanic rock, as well as traces of ancient pathways through which magma once rose towards the surface. It is almost as though the ocean has exposed a cross-section through part of an ancient volcanic island.

How was the great wall of Los Gigantes formed? Why is it so steep? What are the vertical lines cutting through the rock? And did the Guanches really call this place the “Wall of Hell”?

Before you look at Los Gigantes from the land or from the deck of a boat, discover what you are actually looking at.

📖 Los Gigantes with Achamán

In the Tenerife with Achamán guidebook, I do not simply show you the cliffs. Achamán helps unravel the stories and questions that have grown up around Los Gigantes – including those connected with the Guanches, the “Wall of Hell” and the legendary “end of the world”.

You will also discover what to look for in the rock faces, where to find the best views of Los Gigantes from the land and why the cliffs look completely different from the Atlantic.

🗺️ The guidebook includes an interactive map of Tenerife on which I have marked the most interesting viewpoints and useful places for exploring Los Gigantes. You will also find information on how to see the cliffs from the sea – where to take a boat from, what options are available and how to combine a boat trip with further sightseeing in this part of the island.

👉 Discover the Tenerife with Achamán guidebook