Walking on Tenerife – The Mystery of the Adeje Troll

Something spooky is going on in ‘them thar hills’ above Adeje.

A couple of years ago we spent quite a bit of time walking in the Adeje Mountains as research for the ‘Walkabout’ series we were writing for Living Tenerife Magazine. On one path we came across a particularly strange rock formation which looked like a face; a troll’s face to be exact. I took a couple of photos of it, so here’s the proof that it wasn’t simply a hallucination brought about by sniffing some toxic flora along the way (not that there was any, but the smell of curry plants at one point had been quite intoxicating).

Last weekend we returned to the area to map out some routes in more detail in preparation for our new ‘Walks in the Old South’ addition to the Real Tenerife Island Walks series and as we drew closer to the area where we’d seen troll face we kept a look out for his distinctive features.

However, he’d gone!

At first we assumed we must have missed him, even though he had been right beside the path, and the return journey turned into a mission to find him. But as we passed the spot where I was 99.9% certain he’d been, he simply wasn’t there.

Maybe he really had been a troll and after we’d published his photo decided his cover had been blown, so upped sticks and headed deeper into the forest.

Or maybe his face had simply eroded. Personally, I much prefer the first explanation. The World needs a bit of magic now and again.