Diary… Friday, Los Abrigos, Tenerife

~ Billy Mann

The  journey on the 483 bus from Los Cristianos took us through a retail/commercial town called Las Chafiras, a golfing town called Golf del Sur and past some vast banana plantations with plastic canopies the size of football pitches.

Chafiras is a strange conglomerate of warehouses and wholesale units. It would be my first choice were I in need of a new washing machine. 

It has big-name stores such as Lidl and Ikea, too, but its strangeness rests in it obviously being a ‘construct’, a town built for one purpose. It has no soul beyond the cold hand of the transaction. It feels non-human.

Similarly monocultural is Golf del Sur. It is made for golfers and those in their company.

It is clean and green. It boggles the mind to imagine the amount of water needed to keep the fairways and greens in such pristine condition.

Abrigos by contrast is messily human, with fishing boats bobbing in the harbour and swarms of swimming children shouting, squealing and splashing. 

It is an eccentric delight, but probably feeling the walls closing in and the pressure to conform to the developers’ plan, whatever that is.

Published by Billy Mann

I'm originally from Liverpool and worked as a national magazine journalist for more than 30 years before suffering a stroke at age 53. I started blogging as part of a neuro-rehabilitation programme and wrote the very first entries with one finger of my disabled left hand. Later, art became another therapy for me at Headway East London's Submit To Love studios. I blog regularly and volunteer as a teaching assistant, coaching schoolchildren in aspects of journalism.