Car hire inPuerto de la CruzThe north coast · half an hour from Tenerife North

Puerto de la Cruz is the north, which on this island means green instead of dry, cloud instead of guaranteed sun, and a town that existed for two hundred years before tourism arrived. It sits under the Orotava valley with the crater above it, and the weather genuinely differs from the south: the same afternoon can be overcast here and blazing in Los Cristianos. A car is what lets you chase the better half of that, which is the real argument for hiring one here.

The second argument is position. This town sits closer to the things people fly to Tenerife to see than any resort in the south does: the crater is under forty minutes away, the Anaga forests under fifty, Garachico half an hour along the coast and the Orotava valley starts at the top of the road out of town. A week based here with a car covers ground that would be a series of full days from Los Cristianos, and most of it on roads that are worth driving in their own right.

This is the one place on the island where which airport you fly into really matters. Tenerife North is about half an hour away. Tenerife South is an hour and twenty, and ninety odd kilometres of it, which is a long way to drive on the evening you land. If your flight lands in the south anyway, the motorway runs most of the route and the last stretch drops you into the valley from above.

That final descent is worth a word, because it catches people out on their first evening. The TF-5 comes over the shoulder of the valley and drops several hundred metres into the town in a succession of long curves, often out of cloud and into it, and the exits for the centre arrive quickly once you are down. Use a low gear rather than riding the brakes, and if you are arriving in the dark after a southern landing, give yourself the extra twenty minutes rather than the map time.

01 La Orotava, 9 min

Seven kilometres uphill to the old town above you, and the start of the road to the crater. Park at the top and walk down; the streets are steep, narrow and mostly one way.

02 Garachico and Icod, 27 to 31 min

Twenty-two kilometres west to the dragon tree at Icod, another four minutes to the lava pools at Garachico. The coast road between them is one of the best short drives in the north.

03 Tenerife North airport, 27 min

Thirty-one kilometres on the TF-5. The northern airport is the one to fly into if the schedule allows it, and this is the run that makes it worth doing.

04 Santa Cruz, 30 min

Thirty-eight kilometres east to the capital, with La Laguna on the way. The one drive from here where traffic is real: time it outside the commute and use a garage rather than the street.

05 Teide, El Portillo, 38 min

Twenty-nine kilometres up the TF-21 through the pines, and the shortest run to the crater from anywhere on the island. The crater drive has its own page. You are usually above the cloud inside twenty minutes.

06 Taganana and the Anaga, 47 min

Forty-nine kilometres out along the ridge road into laurel forest, with the sea on both sides. Slow, bendy and worth the whole day. Stay on the sealed roads; the tracks are off limits in a hire car.

Those are free-flow times measured by routing, so a real journey is that or longer, never shorter. The south is the long haul from here and there is no way round it: Costa Adeje is 69 minutes and Tenerife South 82, which is why the airport you fly into matters more at this end of the island than anywhere else.

A one way car rental collects in one place and leaves the car in another: on this side of the island that is worth planning the holiday around. Puerto de la Cruz to the southern airport is eighty-two minutes and ninety-seven kilometres, the single longest routine drive on Tenerife, and doing it twice to return a car costs most of a day. Fly into one airport and out of the other, or start in the green north and finish on a southern beach, and the car follows the itinerary instead of fighting it. Set the drop-off separately in the search: the results then show only cars whose supplier allows that pairing, with any one way fee already in the price.

The old town was laid out for people on foot, and it has never pretended otherwise. The streets around the harbour are narrow, largely one way and busy, and the honest plan is to put the car in a paid underground car park near the centre and leave it there. Blue-lined bays on the street are the paid ones, bought from a meter for a limited stay, and unmarked white bays are free; the free ones start a few minutes uphill and are worth the walk.

Ask your hotel what it actually offers before you assume you can park at the door, because plenty of the older places here have no parking at all and the ones that do usually charge a nightly rate for it. That cost belongs in your sums next to the hire. And keep the car small: the difference between a compact car and an estate in these streets is the difference between parking and circling. Parking tickets, like speeding fines, are the driver's to pay and reach you later through the supplier.

Small, and for once not only because of the parking. The roads worth driving up here bend constantly: the TF-21 into the crater, the coast road to Garachico, the whole Anaga ridge. A compact car is more pleasant on all of them, easier in the old town, and cheaper to fuel over a fortnight of daily use, which is what a car gets here rather than the two or three outings it gets in a southern resort.

Two things move you up a class. Four adults with luggage climbing to El Portillo will feel the smallest engines on the way up, and the north is where you will be doing that climb repeatedly. 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 on roads with this many bends and gradients an automatic is genuinely easier to live with.

The questions below are the ones that decide how a week up here works: which airport to fly into, where the car goes, how the cloud behaves and what you need when you collect. The rental conditions themselves are written out in full on the terms page.