Following on from our walk along the shoreline to take a look at the Auditorio de Tenerife and Castle of St John the Baptist then our wander around the very picturesque Palmetum in Santa Cruz de Tenerife we had two more locations in the island’s capital city that we’d identified as “places of interest” and a quick nose at the title of this post will tell you what they were: a museum dedicated to the carnival, and somewhere to enjoy some local drinks. We would achieve visits to both and you can expect to see some photographic evidence in support of this fact below.
We had a bit of a trek with some backtracking on occasion to get to the museum to start with and that is due to the two-dimensional nature of maps on phones and the three-dimensional nature of some of the roads in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. What looked like a sensible route on the phone ended up taking us over a bridge overlooking the museum before we realised we needed to find a way to descend, walk past, then double-back to the building’s location. Still, it was a fairly nice walk on a hot (but not too hot) day, we weren’t in a mad rush, and I always enjoy chances to snap photos of streets and architecture as we stroll around new places.
Santa Cruz de Tenerife is twinned with Rio de Janeiro and part of the reason for that is that both locations hold what are considered to be the two largest and most important carnivals in the world. I won’t pretend that either of us have great interest in carnivals – although I very much enjoyed visiting Notting Hill one year for all the people-watching and photographing it enabled – but we do like museums, especially ones with quirky or unique themes, so the Casa del Carnaval was always going to be something we’d try to look at.
Casa del Carnaval was inaugurated in 2017 and broadly features two main areas, one with a permanent exhibition including costumes and historical items such as posters for the themes of each year’s carnival. Upon arrival we had a short chat with the people at the entrance who were interested in knowing where we were from and who seemed quite surprised when we mentioned that we’d arrived on the cruise ship. That might suggest it’s not a popular attraction for cruisers (I think there were two other people there while we were exploring and they didn’t look like they’d got off the ship) and that might be explained by the many excursions that tend to take ship visitors off elsewhere on the island along with the museum’s location, far enough back from the waterfront and tucked away to require a dedicated visit as opposed to stumbling upon it by chance. We enjoyed the look around, though, and if it’s not something you’ve done before and you’re after something a little different then it’s well worth the walk to see.
Colourful museum visit complete, we now knew that the craft ale place we’d identified would be open so headed that way. This took us towards the coastline and port, and as we approached the Puente Serador bridge we spotted some very nice, large, and colourful (again) street art decorating the arches. Always love to see street art.
A short walk from there brought us to The Craft Room. It wasn’t a large place, only had a few beers on tap, but had a great range of bottled ales and seating that opened up onto a shaded, peaceful, public square. We stayed for several beers, chatted with some of the locals about the state of craft ales on the islands, and bought some glasses to take home. In fact, the only downside to the place was that it closed during that early afternoon siesta period, and as this was a Sunday, it didn’t open again afterwards, so there was only a short window in which to enjoy the beers before we had to leave.
On the way back to the waterfront area of Santa Cruz de Tenerife we passed a large bronze sculpture of a mask, reminiscent of the comedy and tragedy masks of theatre and appropriately so as it was situated outside Teatro Guimerá. The sculpture is called Per Adriano and was created in 1993 by Igor Mitoraj.
The next post in this transatlantic cruise travelogue series will conclude our time on the island with a walk back to the ship and sail way from Tenerife to begin the eight-day Atlantic crossing part of this trip.