The catch at Hacienda del Conde

By car from the hotel door, Tenerife Sur is 68 kilometres and 63 minutes, Tenerife Norte 60 kilometres and an hour, so which airport you land at changes little. The hotel is on Paseo Severiano Ballesteros at the edge of Buenavista del Norte, and the village is not as close as it looks on a map: the first restaurant on Calle El Puerto is 1.1 kilometres and 14 minutes on foot, the fish restaurant at Playa de las Arenas 19 minutes. The only table within ten minutes is the golf clubhouse, eight minutes away. Garachico is 10.5 kilometres and 14 minutes by car.

TITSA's line 363 runs along the north coast from Buenavista through Garachico to Icod and on to Puerto de la Cruz, so a day trip without a car is possible, but a dinner out is not. Everything the hotel is for, Teno and Masca above all, is a drive, the road out to the Punta de Teno cape is open only to the bus and taxis, and taxis over these distances add up.

The hotel is built on the Isla Baja coast under the Teno massif, the side of the island that catches the trade-wind cloud, which is why it is green and why nobody here promises sun. The hotel makes the point for us: the Ocean's Club pool, carved into the lava cliff and, in melia.com's words, extending its waters over the sea, is seasonal, open from June to September with dates that depend on sea conditions. The other pools are heated, because they need to be. There is no beach below the hotel, only cliffs. The nearest sand is Playa de las Arenas, black volcanic sand 1.4 kilometres away, a five-minute drive or a 19-minute walk.

The hotel sells itself on a spa with a heated pool, whirlpool, sauna and Turkish bath, and that is the honest hedge for a February week.

With the village restaurants a drive away, most guests eat at the hotel most nights, and the hotel knows it. Its own restaurants page lists eight venues: Buena Vista, the buffet that does breakfast and dinner, Il Rosmarino for Italian with prior reservation, La Tasca Wine Bar with a formal dress code, a pool bar, a lounge bar, the Ocean's Club terrace, Montenegro, and El Mirador del Guincho, which is the golf clubhouse restaurant eight minutes' walk away. Montenegro's own site sells two tasting menus, six courses at 75 euros a head and ten at 98, Tuesday to Saturday from 19:00 to 23:00, with the whole table on the same menu.

Guests rate the rooms and cleanliness highly and value lowest. They report the dinner buffet dear for what arrives, a service charge added automatically, and extras that were not on the rate. That gap between rooms and value is this paragraph.

The hotel's own room pages give the Premier Room, the Singular Junior Suite, the Golf View, the Garden and both Sea View categories the same 55 square metres, each with a terrace. Only the two suites are bigger, at 96 and 114 square metres. So the whole ladder below suite level buys outlook and nothing else, and the entry Premier looks at the garden. The sea in the photograph belongs to the Sea View categories.

Two further things the room page will not tell you. Guests report that some rooms sold as sea view look at the netting of the golf driving range before they look at the Atlantic. And the hotel offers wedding services and melia.com gives it event rooms; one guest reported late event noise on a night one was on.