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You don’t have to fly halfway around the world in order to enjoy freediving, even if you are diving deep. In fact, you don’t even need to leave Europe! Come to Tenerife! Tenerife is known as The Island of the Eternal Spring, because of its amazing weather all year round. Not too hot in the summer and with a very mild “winter”, during which it is not so uncommon to have 30 degrees sunny days. But aside from the weather, Tenerife is also a great place for freediving, and here’s why.
Tenerife is situated in the Atlantic Ocean which means no thermoclines! The water temperature reaches about 25 degrees in the summer and 19-20 degrees in the winter, but there is no drop in temperature at depth.
Despite most of the island being exposed to winds and rough weather, Tabaiba & Radazul are located in a very sheltered area that also happens to have a lot of depth close to shore. That means that you don’t necessarily need a boat with all the constraints that diving off a boat implies. As a recreational freediver you will have a hassle-free experience because you are able to reach a 30-meter depth with a 50m swim from shore, in fact, you can do all your diving up to this depth while still inside the fixed confined area for swimming/scuba diving, and the biggest bonus is that there is a pretty wreck within 18 and 30 meters of depth. You can do all your training next to it and then do a couple of fun dives at the wreck to finish off your session. If you are an intermediate freediver there is a 55m fixed mooring line less than 200 meters from shore.
For deep diving, we have a 100m deep mooring line at about 400m from shore. This is where my buddies and I are diving when we do our deep dives: we dive off a SUP that is rigged with a counter ballast, and we are using a scooter to pull the whole setup out and for deep safety. That means that we can also lay on the SUP to stay warm in between dives.
I haven’t taken a single week off from training this winter. That’s because I didn't have to! In the winter if you do long sessions you will need a 5mm wetsuit, but if you dive deep and have a short warm-up and dive off a SUP (or a boat) you could dive in 3mm.
There is hardly a European airport that doesn’t have direct flights to Tenerife. You can fly here from central and southern Europe in 4 hours, and from eastern Europe in 5 hours.
Many freedivers struggle to combine family trips with their training. Well, no more of that! Tenerife offers so much more than great freediving conditions. Do your training in the morning and spend the afternoons with your family doing a thousand different things. Tenerife is a great place for outdoor activities such as surfing, hiking, mountain biking, road biking, paragliding, rock climbing, scuba diving, and if your other half is not into sports there are a lot of excursions that you can do together, such as a visit (or two) at the tallest Volcano in Europe and its national park, water parks, many tidal pools, and beaches. We also have one of the world’s biggest lava tubes, and a unique laurel forest (one of few rain forests in Europe).
For all these reasons there are more and more deep freedivers training here, especially since Covid made traveling to many non-European freediving locations difficult if not impossible, several freedivers realized that Tenerife is a viable option also for long term stays.
There are no hotels in Tabaiba & Radazul, but plenty of Airbnbs. This can be expensive if you come unprepared. However, if you come with a group of friends you can rent an apartment with 2-3 bedrooms and the price per person will be more than reasonable. Food and drinks at restaurants are cheap and grocery store prices are lower than in Europe. As long as you have a buddy and your own buoy and weights you can arrange your own training without depending on a facility, especially if you rent a car. Or (if at least one of your group is a certified instructor) just be lazy and rent our facilities at Atlantis Freediving for storage, use of buoy, weights and you will really enjoy that hot shower when you get out of the water! We can also arrange your accommodations just above our freediving center so you won’t even need to rent a car if you don’t want to.