For anyone interested in the natural world, with all its richness of plant and animal life, arrival at the airport of Tenerife Sur in summer might be a bit depressing. The surrounding land will be brown and dry, and the most conspicuous features are the vast expanses of plastic material enclosing plantations of bananas and other fruit and veg. Staying in a tourist resort without a car, it is easy to pass two weeks in the sun and see very little of nature. But it doesn’t have to be like that. When we first visited Tenerife, more than three decades ago, we were doing field studies on lava flows and in volcanic caves, as well as on the snow on the slopes of Teide and in the coastal waters of the island. For six months we were based in La Laguna University and we got to know the island well. But at that time it was hard to find accounts of the natural history of the island, so we set about writing a simple guide. We published it ourselves, laboriously, in that era before digital printing, and sold nearly 3000 copies of our small book, with only a few illustrations, in black and white. In the years that followed we went to other islands in the Canaries, and to the Azores and Galápagos, on research expeditions with our Spanish colleagues, and also went several times to St Helena and to Ascension Island, studying various aspects of their biology. Five years ago, on another visit to Tenerife, we were again captivated by the island, and decided to write a more ambitious book, which was finally published in November 2016. In it, we aim to provide a full account, in text and with over 700 colour photos and diagrams, of the wide variety of places where one can experience the true nature of Tenerife. Our friends on the island have always seemed to delight in showing us their favourite places – many of them rarely seen by visitors – and of course we have also spent many weeks, at all seasons, exploring on our own. The new book is inevitably easier to carry in a car than in a rucksack, but we would like to see it as part of the equipment of all hired cars! With it, anyone prepared to be a little adventurous, enduring some rough and extremely steep and narrow roads, can discover the true beauty and interest of this remarkable island. The book is simply structured, starting with two introductory chapters that set the scene and outline the human history of Tenerife. We then deal in turn with each of the five main natural habitats on the island – the semi-deserts of the coastal regions; the surviving fragments of the rich dry woodland that once occupied much of the area that is now devoted to small-scale agriculture, towns and tourist developments; the luxuriant laurel forests, now only found in remote areas; the moist and dry forests of the native pine, respectively typical of the northern and southern slopes, and often charred by wildfires; and the extraordinary high mountain zone with its austerely beautiful volcanic landscapes and spectacular shrubs. We follow the general descriptions of each of these habitats by a section (highlighted with blue-edged pages) that provides accounts and photographs of some of the best places to find the habitat concerned. Examples are chosen to help people staying in different parts of the island to visit most of the habitats without travelling far, and the most conspicuous animals and plants at each site are listed. Full directions to all these sites are given at the end of the book. We then describe some special habitats, the barren lava and caves – surprisingly rich in animals if one knows how to find them – and the places still harbouring freshwater, now a scarce commodity on the island. The next part of the book comprises full accounts and photos of the birds, butterflies and other animals, many of them occurring nowhere else in the world. The plants are not listed systematically, but the habitat chapters include photos and brief descriptions of most of the species that visitors interested in botany are likely to want to see, all in their natural surroundings. We hope that readers of the book will thus be spared the sense of helplessness that we experienced when first visiting habitats where so many of the plants were unfamiliar. The last main chapter is an account of the geology of the island, focusing not on the complex structure of the various strata, but on the long and often catastrophic history of Tenerife, and on the forces that have created the largest and highest of the Canary Islands and one of the most closely studied volcanoes in the world. Natural History of Tenerife, by Philip & Myrtle Ashmole, is published by Whittles Publishing and is available in bookshops on Tenerife, and online. About the authors Philip and Myrtle Ashmole are biologists who have been under-taking research and conservation projects together for more than half a century. Their early research focused mainly on the ecology of tropical seabirds and on invertebrate animals in barren habitats, but in recent years they have concentrated on ecological restoration. The Ashmoles have published many scientific and popular articles and three previous books: Natural History Excursions in Tenerife (1989); St Helena and Ascension Island: […]