The Ritz-Carlton Tenerife, Abama

Abama is the hotel people mean when they say Tenerife can do proper luxury. It is a terracotta citadel spread over a huge estate above the west coast, with a golf course, a cluster of pools, a funicular down to the resort's own cove and more restaurants than you will manage in a week. The Bolivian architect Melvin Villarroel laid it out as a village seen through the lens of a citadel, across 160 hectares planted with something like 90,000 trees. It opened in 2005 as Abama Golf & Spa Resort, took the Ritz-Carlton name in 2013 and still carries it, and the most recent phase of room refurbishment was in 2023.

The 459 rooms, suites and penthouses are split across three parts of the estate. The Citadel is the main block and the social centre. The Retreat is quieter and has pools of its own. The Penthouses & Suites Collection runs to one and two bedrooms. The Retreat's rooms, in two-storey rows among the gardens known locally as casitas, are the calmest in Tenerife and worth booking by name. Everything else is garden paths, long corridors and buggies.

It has held Michelin stars for years. M.B, Martín Berasategui's kitchen run day to day by Erlantz Gorostiza, holds two stars in the 2026 Spanish guide and is one of only two two-star tables in Tenerife. Akira Back Tenerife took over the old Kabuki room, and the rest runs from Txoko for Basque cooking and Verde Mar for vegetables to Verona, El Mirador, La Veranda and The Beach Club, several of them seasonal. The spa covers 2,500 m². The beach is small and the sea can be lively, but it is a real one, a hundred metres of imported golden sand at the foot of a funicular, and the sunset over La Gomera from the terraces is the best on the island.

The recurring theme in guest feedback is the scale. This is a resort you navigate by buggy, a drive from Costa Adeje with nothing much walkable outside the gates. People who arrive expecting a boutique hotel are baffled. People who arrive planning never to leave are very happy. The main pool gets busy in peak weeks, and the extras, breakfast and dining above all, add up quickly on top of an already grand-resort rate, with Christmas and February the dearest weeks of the year. Book it for a week when you want everything on site and the budget stretches. The ownership and branding arrangements have shifted over the years, so it is worth checking the current name on your confirmation matches what you booked.