Hotel San Roque

San Roque is the antidote to everything else on this list. A restored 18th-century Canarian manor in the middle of Garachico, the old port on the north-west coast, with a central courtyard, a small pool and rooms that mix original wooden balconies with mid-century modern furniture. The house belonged to the Ponte family, Genoese merchants whose ancestor Cristóbal de Ponte founded the town in 1496, and the street outside still carries the name Esteban de Ponte. The restoration ran from 1992 to 1996 and the hotel opened on 6 December that year. Twenty rooms, family-run, quiet, and adults only from fourteen up.

What survives is the bones: interior courtyards, wooden galleries, volcanic stone and walls thick enough to keep the heat out. Against that the owners have set Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Mackintosh and Breuer, and hung work by Carmen Calvo, Gonzalo González, Susy Gómez and Cristina Gámez in the stairwells and corridors. The six categories, from Doble Collection up through Dúplex and Junior Suite to Suite La Torre, differ in size, light and how many levels they run over rather than in view. The pool sits in the heart of the house, heated to between 25 and 27 degrees all year, and there is a roof solarium over the town and the Atlantic. No spa, only a sauna you book to yourself.

Anturium serves dinner from seven until eleven and lunch from Friday to Sunday, cooking to order on local ingredients, and Bar Hoffmann handles the rest. Guest feedback is consistently warm about the atmosphere, the breakfast and the town itself, which is a working place of cobbled squares, a convent or two, the 16th-century Castillo de San Miguel and the natural rock pools of El Caletón where locals swim off the lava. Those pools are what the 1706 eruption left behind when it poured into the old bay and finished Garachico as a port.

The recurring caveats are honest ones: the pool is for cooling off, not laps, rooms vary a lot in size and light, and the north-west gets cloud and the occasional wet day, even in winter. There is no hotel car park either, only a drop-off bay at the door, then street parking or the free public car park about 30 metres away at the old football pitch. This is not a hotel for a sun holiday. It is where you go for two or three nights to see the Tenerife that existed before the resorts, walk the Teno cliffs, drink wine in Garachico's bars and sleep in a house with a history. Pair it with a few nights in the south and you have the whole island.