Car hire inEl MedanoTwenty minutes from Tenerife South · the closest pickup point to the terminal

El Medano is the closest pickup point to the southern airport, and the only town on this coast that was not built for tourists. Along the coast, Golf del Sur was drawn on a plan around a golf course; this place was not. It is a windsurfing town: flat sand, a permanent wind that everyone here treats as an asset, and a low-rise centre that still runs on Spanish hours. If you are landing late and want the shortest possible drive before you stop, this is it.

The eighteen minutes are worth more than they look. A late landing with children in the back is a different evening when the drive is six kilometres rather than twenty-two, and a morning flight home is a different morning when the fuel station and the terminal are both inside a quarter of an hour. It also makes a short hire practical here in a way it is not from the Adeje strip: collect in town for three days of driving and leave the car alone for the rest, and you have lost almost nothing in convenience.

That wind is why the town exists in its current form, and it is worth knowing before you book: it blows hard and often, which is wonderful on a board and less wonderful if you wanted a still beach day. The car matters here because the rest of the south is close, so a base with character and a short drive to everything else is a genuinely good trade.

It has a second effect drivers notice and nobody warns them about. The wind funnels across the plain between here and the airport, and the stretch of the TF-1 either side of the runway is the most exposed road on the island. A high-sided car will move around in it, doors want holding on the way out, and sand blows across the road near the beach end of town. None of that is dangerous at sensible speeds; it is simply the one local condition worth knowing before you take a big car for the sake of the boot.

01 Tenerife South airport, 18 min

Five kilometres, and the shortest airport run on the island from any town with a pickup point in it. Mostly ordinary road rather than motorway, and the last part is signed from the TF-1 in both directions.

02 Costa Adeje, 23 min

Twenty-six kilometres west along the motorway to the big resorts, where the water parks and the sheltered beaches are. Los Cristianos is a minute further on.

03 Vilaflor, 28 min

Twenty-four kilometres inland and about a thousand metres up, climbing out of the dry south into pine forest. The road to the crater goes through here, and the change in temperature on the way up is the thing to plan for.

04 Candelaria, 32 min

Forty-four kilometres up the east coast to the basilica and the black-sand front, and the first stop on the drive north that is not a resort. Easy motorway the whole way.

05 Santa Cruz, 44 min

Sixty-two kilometres to the capital, which from here is an afternoon rather than a day. The city is the one drive where traffic is real, so time it outside the commute and park in a garage rather than hunting the street.

06 Teide crater, 51 min

Forty-seven kilometres up the TF-21 through Vilaflor, wide and sealed the whole way, climbing past two thousand metres. The crater drive has its own page. Take a jacket and use a low gear coming down.

Those are free-flow times measured by routing, so a real journey is that or longer, never shorter. The point of the list is the one nobody expects: because the motorway starts at this end of the coast, the north is closer from El Medano than from any resort in the west. The trade is west-coast distance instead, with Los Gigantes at 42 minutes.

Being this close to the terminal makes a short car rental practical, and the only rule to know is that a day means twenty-four hours. The shortest chargeable rental is a full day, so a morning collection and an afternoon return the next day is billed as two. Inside that, nothing stops you taking a car for three days of a fortnight rather than the whole stay, which is a genuinely good trade from El Medano: the town works on foot, and the driving you want is the crater, the west coast and the north. If the plan changes once you are here, extending is a conversation with the supplier in advance rather than a late return, which is another reason the phone number you gave has to be one you answer.

There are no hotel garages here to fall back on, so the street is the plan. El Medano is a working town rather than a strip: apartments rather than resorts, and parking that was never laid out for a fortnight of hire cars. Blue-lined bays are the paid ones, bought from a meter for a limited stay; unmarked white bays are free. The free ones exist a few streets back from the front and they fill in the late afternoon, when the wind drops and the town comes out.

That makes the size of the car a real decision rather than a preference. A compact car fits the spaces that are actually empty at seven in the evening; an estate or a seven-seater means walking further, every day. If your apartment claims a space, ask what it is before you assume, because a Spanish residential bay is drawn for a Panda. Parking tickets, like speeding fines, are the driver's to pay and reach you later through the supplier.

Small, for two reasons that both apply here more than anywhere else in the south. The parking is street parking, so the car has to fit what is left rather than what you would like; and the wind across this plain pushes a high-sided car around on the motorway in a way a low one barely notices. A compact car is also the cheapest to fuel, and fuel is bought back at the level you were given it.

The exceptions are the familiar two. Four adults with luggage climbing to the crater will feel the smallest engines on the long haul up through Vilaflor, so a step up in class is money well spent if the mountain days are the point of the week. And if nobody in the party drives a manual, filter for an automatic from the start: there are fewer of them here than in the UK, and in the busy weeks they go first. Boards and bikes are the local variable, so check the boot before you book if you are bringing kit.

The questions below are the ones that decide whether this is the right base to drive from: the airport run, the wind, the parking and what you need when you collect. The rental conditions themselves are written out in full on the terms page.