Car hire inSanta CruzThe capital · fifteen minutes from Tenerife North, an hour from the south

Santa Cruz is where the island works: a port, a capital, and a place with no particular interest in holidaymakers, which is exactly why people who have seen the south twice end up here. It has the shops, the carnival, and a beach of imported Saharan sand around the headland. What it does not have is any need for you to drive inside it, and any honest page about hiring a car here has to start with that.

What Santa Cruz does have is position. It sits at the corner of the island where the motorways meet, thirteen minutes from the northern airport, a quarter of an hour from Las Teresitas and on the doorstep of the Anaga. If you are collecting a car here, you are almost certainly doing it to go somewhere, and the roads out are short, quick and among the best on the island. Base yourself in the capital, keep the car in a garage, and take it out for the days that need it.

Twenty minutes out of the centre the Anaga road climbs into laurel forest that has been there since before the Atlantic had islands worth naming, on a ridge with the sea down both sides. That drive, the beach at Las Teresitas on the way, and the run along the north coast are what the car is for. The forest tracks off that road are not: the terms allow paved public roads only.

The Anaga road deserves its warning as well as its praise. It is sealed, ordinary hire cars drive it every day, and it is also relentlessly bendy, frequently single-lane-in-practice where a village narrows it, and often in cloud. Allow twice the time the distance suggests, take the descents in a low gear, and pull in to let local traffic past rather than being chased. Nothing about it needs a special car; it needs an unhurried one.

01 La Laguna, 12 min

Eleven kilometres up the hill to the old university town. The tram does it too, and on a weekday morning the tram wins: parking in the historic centre is genuinely difficult.

02 Tenerife North airport, 13 min

Twelve kilometres, and the shortest airport run on the island. Los Rodeos is the one to fly into if the schedule allows it, and this is the drive that makes it worth doing.

03 Las Teresitas, 15 min

Ten kilometres round the headland to the imported-sand beach, and the easiest half hour of driving from the city. Get there early at a weekend; the car park fills before the sand does.

04 Taganana, 25 min

Nineteen kilometres out along the Anaga ridge and down the far side, through laurel forest with the sea on both sides. Slow, bendy, often in cloud, and the best drive within half an hour of any city in the Canaries.

05 Puerto de la Cruz, 28 min

Thirty-seven kilometres west on the TF-5 to the north coast, with La Orotava two minutes short of it. Easy motorway, busy at commuting times.

06 Teide, El Portillo, 52 min

Fifty-three kilometres up through La Laguna and along the ridge to the northern gate of the park. 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, and around this city the difference at rush hour is real. The south is the long haul from here: Costa Adeje is 55 minutes and Tenerife South 58.

Car rental here comes both ways. We book cars that hold a deposit and cars that hold nothing, and neither is the trick answer.A car with a deposit is usually the lower daily rate and the held sum comes back afterwards; a car with no deposit costs a little more per day and leaves your card alone while you are away. Both sit in the same search with the figure printed on each one, so the decision is made with the number in front of you rather than at a counter. The card rule is the separate thing to check: many suppliers want a physical credit card with raised numbers in the main driver's name whether or not anything is held on it, and your voucher says which applies to your car.

In a working city the simple answer is a garage, and it is the right one. There are paid underground car parks around the centre and along the seafront, they are the least of the available evils for a day, and they take the whole question off your mind. On the street the rule is the Spanish one: blue-lined bays are metered on weekdays for a limited stay, unmarked white bays are free, and the free ones are where the residents already are.

Read the signs before you walk away. Fines are the renter's to pay, a ticket issued to the car reaches you afterwards through the supplier, and ignoring it is not an option that works. This is also the strongest argument on the island for hiring only for the days you are leaving the city: a car parked in a capital-city garage for six days costs money and does nothing, while the same money spent on two days of the Anaga and the north coast buys the part of the island you came for.

Small, emphatically. This is a city with metered bays, one-way systems and multi-storey car parks built to Spanish dimensions, and the roads you will actually enjoy, the Anaga ridge and the drop down to Taganana, are narrow and endlessly bent. A compact car is better in every part of that, and it is cheaper to fuel on the long motorway runs south.

The two exceptions hold here as everywhere. Four adults with luggage climbing to the crater will feel the smallest engines on the long haul up. And if nobody in the party drives a manual, filter for an automatic from the start rather than hoping: there are fewer of them here than in the UK, they go first in the busy weeks, and in city traffic an automatic is worth the difference on its own.

The questions below are the ones that decide whether to hire here at all, and for how long: the airports, the parking, the drives that justify the car and what you need when you collect. The rental conditions themselves are written out in full on the terms page.