Hacienda del Conde

Hacienda del Conde sits at the end of the road in Buenavista del Norte, where Tenerife runs out of coast and the Teno massif drops into the Atlantic. It is adults-only, for guests of 16 and over, part of the Meliá Collection, and built in low Canarian-hacienda style around a golf course that hangs over the sea. The name comes from the estate itself, once the home of the Count of Siete Fuentes. It opened in early 2010 as Vincci Selección Buenavista Golf & Spa, Meliá took it on in December 2015 and rebranded it, and it has since joined Small Luxury Hotels of the World. Nothing else on this list is this remote, and that is the point.

There are 117 rooms and suites, each with a furnished terrace facing the ocean or the course. The ladder is refreshingly plain. A Premier Room at the bottom, then Singular Junior Suites sorted by what you look at, garden, golf course, sea, or sea with a panoramic terrace, then Suites with a sea view, with or without a whirlpool. There are three pools, one of them the Ocean's Club pool, cut into the lava cliff and open only from June to September, when the sea allows. The ALQVIMIA Spa has a heated pool, whirlpool, sauna and Turkish bath.

What guests reliably praise is the quiet, the sea-cliff setting, the heated pools and the sense of being on a different, greener island. Buenavista Golf next door is a Severiano Ballesteros design from 2003, eighteen holes and 6,150 metres laid between the Teno range and the water, with a par three seventeenth played across a ravine to a green above the sea. Eating runs to eight restaurants and bars, mostly the Buena Vista buffet and the à la carte rooms, with El Pándano at the pool. The spa is good, the sunsets are dramatic, and Garachico and the Teno cliffs are minutes away. It is the kind of place where the day is a walk, a swim, a long lunch and a book.

The catches are the flip side of the location. It is over an hour from the south airport and the beaches, so a hire car is essential. There is no beach below the hotel either, only cliffs. The north-west gets more cloud, so a February week is a gamble, and there is little dining nearby beyond the hotel and a couple of village restaurants, which means most evenings happen in-house. The compensation is that rates hold fairly steady through the year rather than spiking the way the south does. Book it for a few nights of seclusion, ideally paired with the south, not as a sun-guaranteed week.