Car hire inGolf del SurTwenty minutes from Tenerife South · built for driving, not for walking

Golf del Sur was built around a golf course rather than grown around a harbour, and that decides almost everything about driving here. It sits on the arid south-east coast in San Miguel de Abona, twenty minutes from Tenerife South, laid out in the age of the car with parking designed in rather than fought over. What it does not have is a front to walk along, so the car is not a luxury here in the way it is in Los Cristianos.

The course is the reason the place exists: twenty-seven holes that held the Tenerife Open four times between 1989 and 1994, with Amarilla Golf immediately along the coast and the marina at San Miguel below. That gives the area an unusual visitor profile for this island, older and more likely to be here for a fortnight than a week, and it changes what the car is for. Fewer beach days, more driving to a tee time, dinner in a real town and a day in the mountains.

Golf del Sur is a genuine pickup point, and a thin one. A car can be collected here rather than at the terminal, which suits anyone who would rather land, get to the apartment and start driving the next morning. But the choice of cars is a fraction of what the airport holds, and it thins first in the busy weeks. If a particular car matters to you, an automatic or something with a boot worth the name, check both and be ready to take the twenty minute drive to collect it.

That is not a reason to book blind. Search your own dates on both and compare what comes back: the deposit, the excess, the card rule and the fuel rule are attached to each car in the results either way, so the comparison is like for like rather than a guess.

01 Tenerife South airport, 22 min

Seven kilometres, and the shortest airport run of any resort on this coast bar El Medano. Ordinary road down to the TF-1 and then a couple of junctions. The routed time includes the terminal approach, which is why seven kilometres reads as twenty minutes rather than ten.

02 Los Cristianos, 19 min

Fifteen kilometres west on the motorway to the old harbour town and the ferry port. Park in a garage rather than hunting the street: the centre predates the car by a long way.

03 Costa Adeje, 21 min

Nineteen kilometres to the newer resort strip, the water parks and the sheltered beaches. Easy motorway, and the one drive on this list you may end up doing twice in a week.

04 Vilaflor, 29 min

Twenty-three kilometres inland and about a thousand metres up, out of the dry coast into pine forest. The last fuel and the last coffee before the climb to the crater, and the temperature drop starts here.

05 Teide crater, 52 min

Forty-six 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, fill up before you start, and use a low gear on the way down rather than the brakes.

06 Los Gigantes, 41 min

Forty-one kilometres to the cliffs at the far end of the motorway, and the start of the old west coast road. Masca is a further couple of minutes past the turn, at forty-three from here.

Those are free-flow times measured by routing, so a real journey is that or longer, never shorter. The shape of the list is the point: from this end of the coast the whole south is inside half an hour and the crater is inside an hour, while the north is a commitment. Puerto de la Cruz is seventy-two minutes and Santa Cruz fifty, so the north coast is a long day out rather than an afternoon.

Child seats and the rest are added to the car rental itself rather than found at the desk, and in a place people arrive at with kit that is worth doing early. Spain requires an approved restraint for children of 135 centimetres and under, and as a rule they travel in the back, so the seats are not something to improvise on arrival: say how many and what ages when you book. The same goes for the boot. A set of clubs and a week of cases is a real load, and the class you choose is the only thing that solves it, since no extra makes a small hatchback bigger. Every extra is priced with the car rather than added afterwards.

This is one of the few places on the island where parking is not the problem. The urbanisation was drawn with cars in it: apartment blocks with their own spaces, wide service roads, and none of the one-way knots that make the old towns tiring. Ask what your apartment actually includes before you assume, because a Spanish residential bay is drawn for a small car, but the general rule holds. Where you do use the street, blue lines are paid, unmarked white bays are free and yellow means no parking.

That frees the size of the car to be about the driving instead of the parking, which is unusual here. The relevant question becomes what you are carrying and where you are going: clubs and a week of luggage want a boot, four adults going up to the crater want an engine, and the old west coast road wants something narrow. If the week is mostly motorway between the coast and a tee time, the cheapest class does the job perfectly well.

Something with a boot, which is not the usual answer on this site. Everywhere else in the south the advice is to go small because the parking decides it; here the parking does not, so the boot and the engine get to. A set of clubs, a week of cases and four adults is a genuine load, and the cheapest class is drawn for two people with cabin bags.

The two familiar exceptions still apply. If the mountain days are the point of the week, the climb through Vilaflor to the crater will find the limit of the smallest engines with a full car, so a step up in class is money well spent. And if nobody in the party drives a manual, filter for an automatic from the start: there are fewer of them, they go first in the busy weeks, and that bites harder at a small pickup point than at the airport.

The questions below are the ones that decide how you use a car from this end of the coast: the airport run, where to collect, the boot, and what you need in your hand when the supplier arrives. The rental conditions themselves are written out in full on the terms page.