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Toddler-friendly travel: Buckets, spades and volcanoes in Tenerife

Just a few hours after our toddler daughter had watched Tenerife’s famously clever parrots in action at Loro Parque, the island's popular wildlife attraction, her fledgling skills for mimicry suddenly got sharper.  ‘Cheap enough!’ she chanted at our fellow diners in a cafe, copying the words that we’d uttered when looking at the menu. Parrot fashion, I think they call it.

Modern history: Based on a Spanish hacienda, the Bahia del Duque is easy on the eye

Cheap enough is a phrase that Tenerife increasingly shirks away from. This Canary Isle, shaped a little like a waddling duck and hanging 300km west of Morocco’s southern coastline, has traditionally been filed under ‘bargain sunshine’. For more than a million Brits every year, it’s a flop-and-drop staple that, particularly in Tenerife’s southern corners, rivals the Balearics, the Costas and its own neighbouring islands for towels on sun loungers.

However, since the attention of the world’s luxury developers was caught a decade or so ago, it’s a description that is becomingly increasingly outdated. Our base for a blast of early spring sunshine is one of a dozen or so new high-end hotels that hammer home the point.

The handsome Gran Hotel Bahia del Duque sits in Costa Adeje, a glitzy enclave of party town Playa de las Américas. It has all the trappings of the kind of luxury mega-resort you might find eating up land in the Caribbean or Florida…only you’ll more than halve your flying time to get here. The transfer time from Tenerife’s southern Reina Sofia airport is just 20 minutes.

Spring tonic: Jo Tweedy and daughter Belle enjoy Tenerife's temperate climate

Covering 100,000m², the 365-room Bahia del Duque feels like a town that’s been created to satisfy a Hollywood film director’s whim; it is an unblemished skyline of pink, terracotta and lemon-hued buildings all styled on 19th century Canary Island architecture. Five pools, including a heated option, flow through 63,000m² of tropical gardens. Should your budget be a little more rock star, there are also villas that come with their own private pools and a 24-hour butler service.

Bringing the movie set to life is a small army of smiling staff who flourish fresh towels by the pool, pour prosecco at dusk and happily chat with younger guests during dinner service. A security gate opens out onto the public El Duque beach, a pristine sweep of soft, salt-and-pepper sand that nudges up against a palm-tree strewn headland. A handful of high-end cafes and restaurants are scattered along this stretch of coast and an upmarket shopping arcade is stuffed to the gills with designer names.

Space to roam...and swim

If you like your weather served warm but not necessarily piping hot, then I’d challenge you to find a nicer winter climate anywhere in the world. With low-season temperatures between 19 and 22˚, it is hot enough to wear shorts but temperate enough not to see your knees turn pink. The mercury never quite rises high enough for anything that stings to come out and play. Simply, if you’ve chased a toddler around a paddling pool under a blazing sun trying to administer a dollop of sun cream, it is weather heaven.

We spent long, warm, sometimes cloudy afternoons on the beach where our 18-month-old, Belle, happily heaped sand in and out of buckets and irrigated her creations with water carried back and forth from the foaming tide.

The children’s facilities at Bahia del Duque are obviously top notch; there were several kids’ clubs, a Teen Lounge games room, tennis courts, pitch and putt and a giant chess set but it didn’t feel particularly like this was a resort overrun by children – even during half-term. Couples on their own seemed to happily rub along with the families and find peaceful corners. The super-swish Spa Bahia has, among other soul-soothing delights, an outdoor Thalassotherapy circuit where grown-ups can feel the pressure of massage jets, wallow in nutrient-rich waters or just swim in silence. Five golf courses within 17km of the hotel mean it’s popular with winter green-seekers too.

So far, so relaxing but I knew from previous pre-baby visits to Tenerife that lovely as sitting around being caressed by trade winds is, there are plenty of unsung delights beyond hotel boundaries that visitors should see.

Entirely understandably, the island’s Spanish - the Tinerfeños - have let tourism own the dark, dry plains of the south but preserved the lush, undulating lands of the north for themselves. Point your compass north, however, and the supermarkets and souvenir shops give way to pine trees, banana plantations - sectioned like the paddy fields of the Far East, and stout-trunked Dragon trees.

That the soil is fertile enough to grow such a diverse array of flora and fauna is down to El Teide, Tenerife’s active volcano. The highest mountain in Spain, Teide forms part of the most visited national park in Europe and can be seen from almost all of the north and quite a chunk of the south too.

One beautiful sandpit: Playa del Duque on Costa Adeje will go down a storm with young children

Hiring a car means you can wind up through the park’s 19,000 hectares at your leisure, stopping to take in the scenery as you meander higher. At around 2,000 metres, Teide's snow-capped crater fills your windscreen and the impact of hundreds of years of eruptions - the most catastrophic in 1798 - on Tenerife’s landscape is there before you. A smooth tarmac road loops through the lava; churned-up and the colour of charcoal. A few miles on, the baked black makes way for red, and you could be in Arizona's burnished canyonlands. If you have a whole day to dedicate, there is a cable car that trundles up to the summit, which stands at 3,718m.

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On this holiday, we chose the squawking, cycle-riding, basketball-playing (honestly) showbirds of Loro Parque over venturing any further north but there is much to see if you wind out of the park on the other side of Teide. Tenerife's capitals, one erstwhile, one modern, lie just nine kilometres apart and are easy to drive to. Bustling port city Santa Cruz is the 21st century face of the island, while UNESCO-stamped former capital San Cristóbal de La Laguna - or just La Laguna – has one foot firmly in the past. The latter became an architectural blueprint for new towns across the Americas as Spain inched ever west and it still retains a ‘last stop before the New World’ feel to it. Back at the ranch, and feeling adventurous for taking a nearly two-year-old to see her first volcano, we were happy to embrace the five-star lounging again.

Dining with a tot will never be a serene culinary experience. There was safety in numbers here though via a seemingly unwritten agreement that families would hover as soon as the restaurants opened and anyone else would come along later when the ankle-biters had succumbed to the Land of Nod.

Away from the beaches: Teide National Park is the island's most beautiful - and highest - sight

There are nine places to eat within the hotel including the main buffet restaurant, El Bernegal, which doesn’t take bookings and could feed the 5000 with its nightly foodie theatricals. The other restaurants are more intimate affairs, opening later and serving up everything from Canarian cuisine to Asian and Italian.

A late-ish dinner at La Tasca, the resort’s Spanish eatery, was delicious but reaffirmed that the buffet was the place for us when Belle nodded, heavy-lidded, into her scoops of vanilla. We certainly didn’t feel bereft though. The food was fresh and interesting - frog’s legs, paella, cooked-to-order rib-eye… and it was refreshing not to have to kowtow to children’s menu favourites such as chicken nuggets. The chef served porridge for breakfast – which had steeled us through England’s icy winter - so he had our hearts from the off.

A four-hour flight buys you off-peak warmth, accommodation for every budget, a ton of family-friendly activities and, should you wish to explore them, cultural and geological showstoppers that will ensure you never view the Canaries in the same way again. I’m sold.

Travel facts

Western & Oriental offers a week’s holiday at the Hotel Bahia Del Duque from £1095 per adult and from £195 per child including bed and breakfast, visit www.wandotravel.com.Monarch operates year round flights to Tenerife from £99.99 return, visit www.monarch.co.uk For more information on visiting Tenerife, visit www.webtenerife.co.uk  





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