The cliffs of Los Gigantes rise almost 600 metres straight from the Atlantic, and the Guanche who once lived beneath them named the wall Muro del Infierno, the Wall of Hell.
They form the western edge of the Teno massif, one of the oldest volcanic formations on Tenerife, raised more than seven million years ago before the island's central cone existed. Water and wind cut the ravines; the sea did the rest, leaving a near-vertical curtain of basalt that continues far below the waterline.
A Los Gigantes Whale or Dolphin Watching Tour and Swim in Masca tour reads today as a single phrase, yet it stitches together two very different landscapes. The channel that separates Tenerife from La Gomera runs deep, sheltered, and unusually calm, and it holds a resident population of short-finned pilot whales estimated at around 200 animals, alongside bottlenose dolphins that remain through every season. In 2021 this stretch of water was declared the first Whale Heritage Site in Europe, a recognition of both the density of cetaceans and the discipline required to watch them well. Traffic here is governed by distance rules and licensing, and the Los Gigantes dolphin watching excursions that leave the coast operate within those limits.
Masca lies inland and upward, a hamlet of a few dozen houses wedged into a gorge in the Teno mountains, reachable for centuries only on foot. Its ravine, the Barranco de Masca, spills toward a small pebble bay that most visitors now reach by sea rather than by the steep descent. From the water the true scale of the cliffs becomes legible: pillars of columnar rock, shadowed sea caves, and the pale opening of the gorge between them. The whole coast sits within a protected rural park, and the clarity of the strait owes much to the absence of sandy runoff. These are the Tenerife whale watching waters at their most concentrated.
The marina at Puerto Deportivo Los Gigantes anchors the modern chapter. Built into the base of the cliffs, it is the harbour from which most Los Gigantes Whale or Dolphin Watching Tour and Swim in Masca tours cast off, a working port of fishing boats, catamarans, and dive tenders. What began as a quiet fishing settlement now frames one of the defining marine landscapes of the Canary Islands.
2 hr
