Trying to explain the Tenerife Carnival to someone who’s never seen it is a bit difficult.
You tell them about the feathers, the drums, the dancers and the floats.
You tell them it goes on for weeks and that half the island seems to take part in one way or another.
What you don’t usually mention is that sometimes the audience is mostly tourists who were just coming back from the beach.
That’s exactly what happened this weekend in Los Cristianos.
The carnival parade people didn’t plan to see
The Gran Coso Apoteosis parade in Los Cristianos Arona is one of the final big moments of the Tenerife Carnival season.
It runs through Los Cristianos and marks the end of carnival for many of the groups across the island.
But if you stood watching the crowd on Sunday afternoon, you’d notice something slightly funny.
A lot of the people watching didn’t actually plan to be there.
They simply stumbled across it.
One visitor from Madrid even asked someone nearby if what he was seeing was a bullring.
Not quite.
But you can forgive the confusion.
Carnival groups from across the island
The parade itself brought together many of the best known carnival groups from Tenerife.
Groups like Diablos Locos, Zeta Zetas, Bahía Bahitiare, Tropicana and Cariocas all took part.
Also there was the well known comparsa Los Joroperos, led by Fernando Hernández.
For the groups themselves this parade is quite important.
It’s basically the goodbye.
After weeks of rehearsals, performances and late nights, this is where many of them wrap things up for the year.
Carnival meets beach life
What made the whole thing slightly surreal was the setting.
On the road you had dancers in elaborate costumes with batucada drums echoing down the street.
On the pavements you had tourists in flip flops holding beers and watching like it was the evening entertainment at their hotel.
It was about 4:30 in the afternoon, the sun was still warm and people were drifting between the beach and the bars.
And yes… the smell of sunscreen was everywhere.
Very much the south of Tenerife in a nutshell.
A mixture of locals and visitors
Some locals did comment on it.
One guy who had come to support his mother in one of the carnival groups looked around and wondered how many people watching were actually from Tenerife.
But that’s the reality of the south these days.
People from everywhere.
Different languages.
And plenty of tourists who discover local events purely by accident.
When tourists discover Tenerife Carnival
For many visitors it was their first experience of the island’s carnival.
One British tourist said she had simply come to Los Cristianos for a beach day with her children and ended up watching the parade.
Her kids loved it.
A family from Italy said something similar. They’d heard Tenerife Carnival was famous but didn’t expect to find it happening so close to Easter.
Carnival back home normally finishes much earlier.
Tenerife does things slightly differently.
A very Tenerife moment
In the end the parade was exactly what you’d expect.
Music.
Colour.
Drums echoing through the streets.
And a crowd made up of locals, residents, tourists and plenty of people who had no idea the event was happening until they turned the corner.
Which, if you think about it, is actually a pretty good summary of life in Los Cristianos.
You go out for a coffee or a walk along the promenade…
And suddenly you’re watching half the island dancing down the street.
If you’d like to read the original news coverage of the event, you can see it here.