An intimate wedding in Tenerife: how many guests, and what changes with each number

With twenty people you can seat everyone at a single long table, and that is the whole difference. Nobody ends up at the cousins' table, there is one conversation rather than twelve, and the couple reach the end of the night having spoken to everybody.

The logistics change too: no table plan, no PA system, barely any signage. A good corner of the garden is enough, and the caterer can do things that do not hold up across a hundred plates.

And where people sleep changes. Twenty fit in the houses of an estate, so the wedding becomes a whole weekend with the people who matter, instead of six hours and a coach home.

This is the most common size for the weddings held here, and I do not think that is an accident. It still fits in a garden without setting up fairground infrastructure, and it already lets you invite friends and not only family.

Above thirty, round tables appear, along with a seating plan and somebody to keep the timings. And sound appears: in an open garden with fifty people talking, a speech without a microphone does not reach the third table.

The wet-weather plan gets serious in this bracket too. Moving twenty people under cover can be improvised; moving fifty cannot. You decide it months ahead or you do not decide it at all.

Beyond that it is no longer a celebration in a garden, it is an event with a production behind it. You need a marquee or a real plan B, extra toilets, more floor staff, organised parking and, almost always, guest transport.

There is nothing wrong with any of that, but it is worth knowing that the jump in cost is not proportional to the number of people: between sixty and a hundred guests you cross several thresholds at once, and the budget takes a bigger step than the arithmetic suggests.

Here the seated capacity with a wet-weather plan is the number that governs everything, and it is the figure to get in writing from any venue before holding a date. We go into it in more detail in the guide on how a wedding at an estate actually works.

This is the part almost nobody mentions, and it is the real argument for going small. With fewer people, the same budget buys something else.

With a marquee and a hundred guests, rain is an inconvenience. With twenty people and an outdoor ceremony, rain is the whole wedding, because the small plan usually goes without cover.

In northern Tenerife the good months for celebrating outdoors are May, June, September and October. And here is a figure that surprises everyone: August has nearly twice as many foggy days as October — 9.5 against 5.1 on average at the official northern station — so summer is not the safe bet it looks.

If you are having a small wedding without a marquee, choose the month more carefully than the dress. We break it down month by month in the guide on when to visit the north.

One thing that does not change with guest numbers: the legal deadlines. A civil ceremony has formalities with their own timings; a symbolic one has none, because it carries no legal effect. Most couples coming from abroad sign at home beforehand and hold a symbolic ceremony here.

It is all explained, with the real deadlines, in the guide to civil and symbolic weddings in Tenerife.