A wedding at a Tenerife estate: how it actually works

A venue's capacity is not one number, it is three, and you should ask for them separately. How many fit standing at the drinks reception, how many fit seated for the meal, and how many fit seated for the meal if it rains and everything has to move under cover. The third is the one that decides, and it is the one almost nobody asks about.

A garden that takes a hundred and twenty standing can come down to sixty seated at round tables, and to thirty if the wet-weather plan is an indoor room. If your guest list is near the limit, get all three numbers in writing before you hold a date.

The other useful question is how many events run at once. At a venue with two spaces, you hear the music from the wedding next door. Here only one event is held at a time, and that affects the price too.

Instinct says July and August. The northern Tenerife data says otherwise. The official AEMET station at 632 m records an average of 9.5 foggy days in August and 10.7 in July, against 5.1 in October. High summer has nearly twice as many days with the cloud lid over the sun.

May, June, September and October are the good months for an outdoor wedding in the north. October has a 22.5 °C average high and 194 hours of sun, with 47 mm of rain spread over six and a half days of the month: the risk is real but manageable with a marquee.

November is another matter, with 81 mm across more than eight days and darkness falling at six in the evening after the clocks change on the last Sunday in October. It can be done, but the ceremony has to move early and you need proper cover.

An outdoor wedding in Tenerife is planned backwards from sunset, not forwards from the ceremony time. In October the sun sets around half past seven, and after the clocks change, at half past six.

Given that, the shape that works is: ceremony an hour and a half before sunset, drinks as the light goes, dinner already under artificial light. Put the ceremony too late and the group photographs are taken in the dark, and there is no fixing that afterwards.

The other classic mistake is transport. If guests sleep in the south and the wedding is in the north, you need to allow an hour and a half by coach each way and decide who pays for it. Left until late, that detail is what blows the budget in the final month.

An estate rents you the space and, depending on the case, the basic furniture. Everything else is brought in, and that list is longer than it looks the first time you do it.

This is the concrete advantage of marrying at an estate with accommodation, and the reason many couples end up choosing one. If the couple and close family sleep where the celebration happens, you cut out the two worst journeys of the day: the morning one and the small-hours one.

Ask how many beds there are on the estate itself, whether they are available the night before for the set-up, and whether they can be booked as a block. Ask as well what there is ten minutes away by car, because that is where the rest of the guests will sleep.

In our case there are three separate houses inside the estate, and they can be booked together for the whole weekend. A fourth, La Casita del Árbol, is on the way.

We do not quote figures for other venues or suppliers, because they change every season and because an invented number in a blog post ends in an argument. What can be said is the split, which is fairly stable: catering takes the largest share, usually more than half the total.

After that come, in no fixed order, the venue hire, photography and video, sound and lighting, and flowers. Guest transport turns up at the end and catches a lot of people out.

The item most often underestimated is the wet-weather plan. Booking a marquee just in case costs money you may not use, and not booking one costs the entire wedding if the day lands on one of November's eight rainy days. In the north, between May and October, that is a reasonable bet; outside those months it is not.

We cover that separately and in detail, because the deadlines surprise people: the difference between a civil and a symbolic ceremony, and which documents you need if one of you is not a resident, is in our guide to civil and symbolic weddings in Tenerife.

The short version, to decide today: if what you want is the handsome ceremony in the garden with the sunset behind you, most couples sign at the register office beforehand and hold a symbolic ceremony here with no waiting periods. That is what most couples coming from abroad do.