A banana plantation Los Realejos and how best grow bananas.

Notice the banana fields on your right, once you are past San Vincente which is known for special Spain traditions, as shown on the map called San Pedro Mirador beside.

Mirador means look-out.

Open door banana farmstead for a Tenerife day trip

The beauty with this banana farm or Finca de platanos, as called in Spanish? You can walk or even drive right through this banana plantation with your bicycle, motorbike, car or wheelchair, contrary to most Tenerife banana plantations.

Park on the bottom or by the wayside and go to the beach front of El Guinaste for a swim, for fly fishing or for a leisure walk...

Park your car or get off the bus and walk down the cobble stone road. It curves once and then it leads you straight down to the hamlet Rambla del Mar by the ocean. Bananas are everywhere, they are on the left and on the right, in your back and in front. This is banana land.

By the way, be careful to drive down this road, as it's not easy for two cars to overtake or pass each other.

Often, citrus trees grow at its borders. Ripe oranges might tempt you to pick them.

It is easy to collect citrus fruit, while bananas require some more complicated and skilled harvesting.

A bunch of ripe bananas is very heavy and shouldn't be dropped onto the ground. When it happens, the fruit will get brown and bruised inside.

More tips to handle bananas in the fields

Make sure that the wine-red flower on the bottom of the stalk has well dried out or has fallen off. This is the case in the photo beside. That's a good time then to cut the bunch of bananas, as is. Don't split.
Wrap the cut part with something, as it will drip juice by bleedinga white liquid for a while, which might stain you. Otherwise leave it on a wall of the banana farm to dry out.

You could also wrap the bunch of bananas in newspaper and leave it in a shed out of the sun.

Bananas need much water and a soil where their soft roots may enter the ground to collect more moisture.

Get a Farm water tariff

Apply for an agricultural water tariff for banana cultivation. Such farmsteadt water supply is much cheaper than domestic water.

It certainly also helps that the Rambla del Mar
banana plantation is on lower located land. Any ground in a dip receives automatically more rain water which runs down any slopes. Then there is an irrigation system with thin flexible black plastic pipes for the subtropical plants as well. All three reasons result in a very green banana paradise, as depicted on the photo above.

Banana care

Banana farming maintenance is very hard work, as banana plants should be split quite often. They will then branch out again by growing new shoots from the bottom up. It is not good enough to just cut down a banana trunk, after collecting its fruit. This will result in smaller bananas, eventually.

Thinning out bananas

Treat a banana plantation like your carrot field. Carrots grown from seed need to be thinned out, as each plant grows better with more space around it, instead of being crowded by other plants.

Viable export of bananas

Banana plantations for the export of bananas became only interesting after the building of more steam boats in the XIX century. That's when Canary Island bananas hardly ever left Hamburg, as they were virtually sold within minutes from the ships in which they had arrived. I watched this once, 45 years ago.

Tenerife exports many bananas to mainland Spain per year. I had statistics but those may not be correct now. I noticed many banana farms which are now neglecting their crops. Nevertheless, a very large part of them are consumed on the Canary Islands.

Heart worms from banana farms

By the way, there are insects or microscopic small living things in every Tenerife banana plantation which can cause heart worms in dogs if they have not been inocculated against them. The disease will eventually kill your pets if heartworm trouble is not being prevented. I was told by a local vet that it is best to inoculate against this menace before you bring a dog to any Canary Island.

Translate banana plantation into Spanish

Small bananas are not automatically finger bananas

I have not seen real finger bananas in Tenerife. Finger bananas grow on tall elegant plants. Also, the fruit is not only short but much thinner and so is its silky skin. I remember that my real finger bananas had much more loose ground for their roots to go deeper. This isn't possible on a volcanic island.

Small country inn holiday home in Tenerife

Go back to Los Realejos to find out more about this town which had reached 37559 inhabitants at the end of 2010. That makes it a slightly more populated region than Puerto de la Cruz with 32219 residents, while Realejos has the most space of Tenerife and therefore less people per square km.

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