Car hire inCosta AdejeCollect in the resort · or at Tenerife South, half an hour down the TF-1

Costa Adeje is the one resort on this island where you could genuinely manage without a car, which is exactly why it is worth thinking about properly. The strip has everything within a walk: the beaches, the water parks, and more restaurants than a fortnight can cover, running on into the Americas strip at the southern end. The car is not for the resort. It is for the fact that the resort is a very small part of the island, and the rest of it is closer from here than most people assume.

Half an hour of driving from this strip reaches the Masca valley, the west coast cliffs and the pine forest above Vilaflor, and fifty minutes reaches the floor of the crater. None of that is on a resort bus timetable, and the excursion coaches that go there leave when it suits them rather than when the light is good. That is the whole argument for the car, and it is worth being honest that it is the only argument: if your week is beach, pool and the strip, you do not need one.

That ridge behind the hotels is the point. Adeje is built on a shelf under the mountains, so every drive worth doing starts by climbing away from the sea, and within twenty minutes of leaving the strip you are on roads with nothing on them. The TF-1 runs south back to the airport and north as far as Santiago del Teide, and it is fast, free and dull in the way a motorway should be. There are no tolls anywhere in Tenerife, so the only money the road can cost you is a fine.

Getting out of the resort is the fiddly part and it is over quickly. The strip is a grid of one-way loops between the hotels, signposted for the beaches rather than for the motorway, so aim inland first and pick up the TF-1 signs on the main road above the town. After that the driving is easy: two lanes, 120 where it is posted, and junction numbers that count down as you head south toward the airport. Coming back the other way, the resort exits arrive in quick succession and they are easy to overshoot, which costs you a few kilometres to the next turn and nothing else.

01 Los Cristianos, 13 min

Eight kilometres down the coast, and the reason to drive it is the ferry port rather than the town: the boats to La Gomera leave from there, and the easy way to use them is to park in Los Cristianos and cross as a foot passenger.

02 Los Gigantes, 27 min

Twenty-six kilometres north on the TF-1 and then down into the town, with the cliffs dropping straight into the water at the end of it. The road in is steep and the parking is above the harbour, so it is a walk down and a climb back. The pickup point there is a separate collection point if you would rather start from that side.

03 Masca, 29 min

Thirty-four kilometres, and the last part is the road everyone has been told about: single track in places, passing bays, stone walls and a drop on one side. Ordinary hire cars drive it every day. Go slowly, pull in early, and go in the morning before the coaches.

04 Teide crater, 52 min

Fifty kilometres up the TF-21 through Vilaflor, wide and sealed the whole way, climbing past two thousand metres. Take a jacket, expect a small engine to work, and use a low gear on the way down rather than riding the brakes. The crater drive has its own page.

05 Santa Cruz, 55 min

Eighty kilometres of motorway to the capital, which is the one drive from here where the traffic is real. Time it outside the commute and park in a garage rather than looking for a space on the street.

06 Puerto de la Cruz, 69 min

Seventy-two kilometres round to the green side of the island, usually through the cloud belt on the way. If it is grey when you arrive, that is the north being the north, and driving up out of it is the standard answer.

Those are free-flow times measured by routing, so a real journey is that or longer, never shorter. The airport itself is 30 minutes and 22 kilometres from the strip, which is worth knowing before you book a transfer down and a resort pickup the next morning.

Car rental in Costa Adeje is not one car with a photograph; it is a fleet of classes, and the resort decides which end of it you want.Small hatchbacks price the lowest and fit the hotel garages that were drawn for them. Compacts and crossovers are the sensible middle if the crater and the west coast are on the list, because the climbs find the limit of the smallest engines with four adults aboard. Seven seaters and estates exist here too, and they are the ones to book earliest, since Adeje fills with families in the school holidays. Filter by transmission, seats and class in the search and the results carry each car's own deposit, cover and card rule with it.

The hire is the price you compare; the parking is the price you forget. Most of the newer hotels on this strip have an underground garage and most of them charge a nightly rate to use it, which over a fortnight can rival the cost of the car. Ask the hotel what it charges before you decide whether you want the car for the whole stay or only for the days you are going somewhere.

On the street the rule is the Spanish one: blue-lined bays are paid, you buy a ticket from the meter for a limited stay, and unmarked white bays are free. The free spaces exist, mostly inland of the main road and in the residential streets above the hotels, and in high season they are taken by mid-morning. Nothing about parking is expensive here by mainland standards. It is simply a cost that belongs in the sums next to the car, along with fuel, because the tank is the other one people leave out.

Small wins here more often than it loses. The roads that make the car worth having are the narrow ones, and a compact car is easier on the Masca hairpins, easier in the resort's one-way loops and easier to fit into a hotel garage bay that was laid out for Spanish city cars. The motorway is the only place a bigger engine earns its keep, and the TF-1 is short.

Two things do change the answer. Four adults with luggage climbing to the crater will feel the smallest engines on the long haul up through Vilaflor, so go a class up if the mountain days are the point of the week. And if nobody in the party drives a manual, book an automatic explicitly rather than hoping: there are fewer of them here than in the UK, and they go first in the busy weeks. Beyond that, the sensible move is to price the classes for your own dates rather than take anyone's word for what is cheap this week.

The questions below are the ones that decide whether the week works: where to collect, what you need when you collect, and how long the drives really take. Anything about the rental conditions themselves is written out in full on the terms page.