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Tenerife

TenerifePhoto: Jörg Spaniol
The ride along the Anaga mountain ridge is only for cyclists with a head for heights.
Very special tourists nest on the high plateau of the Canary Island of Tenerife in winter: ambitious professional cyclists use the lunar landscape on Teide for altitude training. But connoisseurs will also find exhilarating routes around Spain's highest mountain.

Mount Teide is a very special place for cyclists, as the "Cañadas del Teide" are one of the few regions to which the cracks can retreat for altitude training in winter. The alternatives - Chile, Mexico or Ethiopia - are far away and not always as comfortable as Tenerife. From a purely physiological point of view, it almost doesn't matter: the main thing is that the sleeping area is high up and the thin air stimulates the body. To then add, somewhat less enthusiastically, that the evening programme is limited to your own computer and the TV programme.

However, day visitors can hardly escape the magic of the volcanic lunar landscape around the 3,715 metre high peak. They arrive by hire car from the resorts, sip a shivering coffee on the terrace of the Parador
of the Parador and look up with one hand over their eyes to the summit, to which a cable car is whirring. The air is so clear that international astrophysicists operate an observatory on the edge of the Caldera de las Cañadas, the volcanic cauldron. A high desert, in the centre of which stands a small, well-heated hotel.

If there were only this special place, Tenerife would remain a kind of fitness laboratory for racing cyclists. But the 80-kilometre-long island is as diverse as an entire country. The Anaga mountains, around 40 kilometres north-east of the summit, provide the greatest possible contrast to the barren Teide.

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You can download the entire article about Tenerife and the GPS data for these tours below:
- Tour 1: Climbing course (50 kilometres, 1,500 vertical metres, max. 15 percent gradient)
- Tour 2: Anaga-Exotic (54 kilometres, 1,900 vertical metres, max. 15 percent gradient)
- Tour 3: Through the forest to the moon (101 kilometres, 2,500 metres in altitude, max. twelve percent gradient)
- Tour 4: Off to the south (71 kilometres, 2,000 metres in altitude, max. 14 percent gradient)

GPS DATA: TOUR offers the tour data for free download. You can download the tracks in GPX format directly onto a GPS device or view them on your computer in Google Earth or Google Maps.

Downloads:
PDF: Spain: Tenerife
 GPS data: Spain: Tenerife

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