Playa Jardín

Playa Jardín is in Puerto de la Cruz on the north coast of Tenerife, beneath the Punta Brava headland and within sight of Mount Teide when the cloud lifts. It is a black-sand beach of about six hundred metres, and it is a designed object.

The north coast of Tenerife has surf and very little natural beach, and Puerto de la Cruz was a tourist town without a usable shore. The response, executed to a scheme associated with the Lanzarote artist César Manrique and completed in 1993, was to build one: sand placed, breakwaters constructed offshore to calm the water, and gardens laid out behind with volcanic rock, palms and water features. Manrique's work across the Canaries is the reference point for the idea that intervention in a landscape can be done with restraint, and this is one of the clearer examples.

The sand is black volcanic, coarse and hot underfoot in sun. The breakwaters remove much but not all of the Atlantic swell; red flags fly regularly on this coast and are worth taking seriously. The water is cooler than the south of the island, which is why most package tourism went to Playa de las Américas instead.

Development is a town rather than a resort strip: hotels, the gardens, a promenade, and the old fishing quarter of Punta Brava at one end. The beach is free and public with lifeguards in season. Puerto de la Cruz has a second Manrique work: the Lago Martiánez, a complex of saltwater pools built into the seafront in 1977 for exactly the reason the beach was later created — the sea here is too rough to rely on.

Black sand, imported and arranged, laid out by César Manrique in a place that had no beach at all — and the reason it works is that it does not announce itself as designed. The Atlantic here is rough and the flags matter. Look at what Manrique did to Lanzarote afterwards and the logic becomes visible.