Car hire inLos GigantesThe west coast · fifty minutes from Tenerife South

The cliffs here fall five hundred metres straight into the water, and the town is built on the slope beside them. That geography explains everything about the place: it is steep, it is smaller than the southern resorts, and it sits at the end of the motorway rather than in the middle of everything. People come for the cliffs, the whale boats and the quiet.

It also explains why the car is closer to essential here than at any other pickup point on the island. There is no strip to walk, no second resort next door and no bus that goes anywhere you want to go at a time you want to go there. Two days will finish the town. Everything after that, the Teno roads, Masca, Garachico, the crater, is a drive, and all of it starts from the top of the hill behind the harbour.

Los Gigantes is the far end of the island's road network, and that is the argument for the car in one sentence. Masca is twenty-four minutes up the hill on the old road. The crater is fifty-four inland. The southern resorts are under half an hour back down the motorway. Without a car you are choosing between a small town and a boat trip; with one, the whole west is yours.

The driving out of the town is the part worth preparing for. Every road leaves uphill, in first and second gear, on a gradient that will surprise anyone who has only driven the motorway so far, and the junction at the top puts you straight onto the TF-454. Coming back down at night, use a low gear rather than the brakes; it is a short descent but a steep one, and the same discipline the crater road needs applies here on a smaller scale.

01 Masca, 24 min

Twenty-one kilometres over the top on the old road, and the best short drive on the island. Single track in places with passing bays and a drop on one side. Ordinary hire cars do it daily; go early and go slowly.

02 Costa Adeje, 27 min

Twenty-five kilometres back down the coast to the big resorts, for the water parks, the sheltered beaches and a supermarket run that has more choice than the town.

03 Icod de los Vinos, 40 min

Thirty-four kilometres north on the coast road, past Santiago del Teide and down through the banana terraces. The road itself is the reason to go, and Garachico is four minutes further.

04 Tenerife South airport, 51 min

Forty-four kilometres, nearly all motorway once you are up the hill and onto the TF-1. The furthest airport run of any resort with a pickup point, so leave a margin on the way home rather than discovering it on the day.

05 Teide crater, 54 min

Forty-seven kilometres inland, climbing past two thousand metres. The crater drive has its own page. Take a jacket, expect a small engine to work, and use a low gear on the way down.

06 Puerto de la Cruz, 64 min

Fifty-nine kilometres round the top of the island to the north coast, usually through the cloud belt on the way. A full day out rather than an afternoon, and best started early.

Those are free-flow times measured by routing, so a real journey is that or longer, never shorter. Santa Cruz is the outlier at 75 minutes and 102 kilometres, which is the price of being at the far end of the network; everything on the west side is close.

Every car rental here comes insured as standard, and the level of cover is something you choose during booking rather than argue about at the end. That choice matters more from Los Gigantes than from a flat resort. Standard cover excludes the wheels, the underside, the windscreen and the interior, and those four are exactly what a walled hairpin, a kerb or a loose stone on the old west coast road reaches first. If Masca and the climb out of the town are on your week, the arithmetic usually favours reducing the excess when you book. If the week is mostly the motorway down to the resorts, it matters far less. Either way the excess is printed on the car before you commit.

Park high and walk down. It is the only piece of local advice this town really needs. Los Gigantes steps down to the harbour, and the pressure on the spaces increases the closer you get to the water, which is exactly where everybody tries first. Blue-lined bays are paid, bought from a meter for a limited stay; unmarked white bays are free. The free ones are up the hill, five minutes of walking away, and they are still there in the middle of the afternoon.

The gradient makes two other things worth saying plainly. A handbrake on a steep slope wants using properly, in gear and wheels turned in; and a compact car is far easier to place in a short bay on a hill than an estate or a seven-seater. If your apartment offers a space, ask whether it is on the flat, because plenty of them are not. Parking tickets, like speeding fines, are the driver's to pay and reach you later through the supplier.

Small and willing. The roads that make this base worth choosing are the narrow ones over the top, and a compact car is easier on the Masca hairpins, easier in a short bay on a hill, and cheaper to fuel on the long motorway run to the airport. Width is what costs you here, not power: on a single-track road with a wall on one side, fifteen centimetres either side is the whole difference between comfortable and unpleasant.

The exceptions are the usual two. Four adults with luggage climbing to the crater will feel the smallest engines on the way up, 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, they go first in the busy weeks, and on gradients this steep an automatic is genuinely easier to live with.

The questions below are the ones that decide how a week here works: the airport run, the Masca road, the parking on the slope and what you need when you collect. The rental conditions themselves are written out in full on the terms page.