Tenerife, measured
The questions guidebooks answer with adjectives, answered with counted data. Three that decide a trip — the mountain, the dust and the sea — worked out from open European climate data instead of guessed at.
Ten complete years behind the mountain, 4 behind the sea and only 3 behind the dust — each page prints its own sample size, and shows a warning where that sample is thin. No affiliate links, nothing to sign up for.
-4.5 °C
Median temperature at the top of Teide in January
People arrive in shorts. It is 3,555 m up.
30%
Share of December days over the EU dust limit, south coast
And it is not the month everyone warns you about.
94% vs 60%
March days with waves over 1.5 m: north coast vs south coast
Same island, 40 km apart.
The tools
How cold is the top of Teide, really?
And will the wind be bad enough to stop the cable car? Pick your month — the answer is below, in one sentence.
When does the calima actually arrive?
Saharan dust is the one Tenerife weather event that can genuinely spoil a week, and every guide describes it with a shrug. Here it is counted.
Which coast should you book for the sea?
Tenerife has a calm coast and a rough one, and which is which does not change. If you are coming for the water rather than the sun, this decides the side of the island.
The Teide summit permit, explained
The last 160 metres of Teide — from where the cable car leaves you to the actual summit — need a permit. Here is what it costs now and how to get one.
Cable car, buses and what it all costs
The permit is only half the problem. Here is how you actually get up there, what it costs, and the timing that catches people out.
Why this exists
Search for “calima in Tenerife” or “is the Teide cable car open” and you get the same paragraph rewritten forty times, all of it hedged, none of it counted. The underlying data is public and free — the European reanalysis products that record every hour of weather over the island. Nobody had turned it into the answers people actually search for.
So this site is one thing only: those datasets, aggregated into the specific questions a visitor asks, with the sample size printed next to every figure. Where the sample is thin, it says so in orange at the top of the page rather than in a footnote.
The aggregation script is deliberately small and readable, and the Method page spells out every choice in it — including the one that nearly published three years of dust data labelled as ten.