Car hire inLos CristianosA little over half an hour from Tenerife South · the port for the other islands

Los Cristianos was a fishing village that tourism grew around rather than a resort that was planned, and the street layout still says so. The harbour works, the beach is the one the town always had, and the centre is walkable in a way the newer strips are not. It runs on into Playa de las Americas along the front, twenty minutes on foot, so people staying here often never notice where one ends.

For a driver that history matters in one practical way: the roads in the middle of town were laid out before there were cars to put on them. Nothing about that makes the town hard to drive, but it does decide what you should hire. A compact car parks in spaces a family estate has to drive past, and the streets behind the front are narrow, one-way and busy with people who are on foot because everything here is walkable. Out on the motorway none of it matters. In the last three hundred metres it matters a lot.

Every ferry to La Gomera, La Palma and El Hierro leaves from here, which makes this the one southern town where a day on another island is genuinely easy. The way to do it is to leave the car parked and cross as a foot passenger: it is cheaper than taking a vehicle, it takes the ferry queue out of your morning, and the terminal is a short walk from the town with parking on its own doorstep. A day trip does not need the car to move at all.

What it does need is an early start. The boats fill in high season and the road down to the harbour is the busiest few hundred metres in the town, so the difference between leaving at eight and leaving at ten is most of an hour. Park once, walk down, and let the car sit until you are back.

01 Playa de las Americas, 10 min

Four kilometres along the front, and the drive only makes sense in the evening or with beach kit; in daylight the walk is quicker than finding somewhere to leave the car at the far end.

02 Costa Adeje, 14 min

Nine kilometres up the coast to the newer resorts, where the hotel garages and the big water parks are. Easy road, and the parking at that end is easier than here.

03 Vilaflor, 30 min

Twenty-five kilometres inland and about a thousand metres up, through terraces and then pine forest. This is the road to the crater, and the village is where most people stop on the way.

04 Tenerife South airport, 33 min

Twenty kilometres of motorway, well signed, no tolls. Allow more than the map says on a return flight: the last stretch into the terminal and the fuel stop before it are where the time goes.

05 Masca, 36 min

Forty 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 daily. Go early, go slowly, and pull in before you have to.

06 Teide crater, 53 min

Forty-seven kilometres up the TF-21, 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 north is the long haul from here: Santa Cruz is 57 minutes and Puerto de la Cruz is 76, which is a day out rather than an afternoon.

Away from the two airports, renting a car usually means the supplier brings it to where you are staying.That matters more in Los Cristianos than almost anywhere on the island, because the old centre is exactly the sort of place you do not want to collect a car in cold: narrow one-way streets, a harbour on one side and residents' parking on the other. Your voucher names who is coming and when, and the number you give when booking is how they find you, so it needs the country code on it and needs to be answered. No counter, no queue, and no shuttle to an industrial estate.

This is the one southern resort where the size of the car changes your day. The centre is old town: narrow streets, one-way loops and a pedestrian core, with the pressure worst around the port and along the front. Blue-lined bays are the paid ones, bought from a meter for a limited stay, and unmarked white bays are free. The free ones exist, mostly uphill and back from the sea, and in high season they are taken by the middle of the morning.

The practical answer is to treat the car as something you park once. Find a space when you arrive, walk the town, and take the car out for the days you are going somewhere. Apartments here often have no parking of their own, so ask before you assume, and if the answer is that there is a space, measure your expectations against a bay laid out for a Panda rather than an estate. Parking tickets, like speeding fines, are the driver's to pay and reach you later through the supplier.

Small, and more decisively than anywhere else in the south. The town rewards it, the mountain roads reward it, and the only place a bigger car is better is the twenty kilometres of motorway to the airport, which you drive twice. A compact car is also the cheapest to fuel, and fuel here is bought at the level you return it, so a thirsty car costs you twice over a fortnight.

The exceptions are the usual 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.

The questions below are the ones that decide how the week works from here: the parking, the airport run, the drive up to the crater and what you need when you collect. The rental conditions themselves are written out in full on the terms page.