Tenerife villa with a pool: what to check before you book

A private pool is one only your house uses. A shared pool is used by several houses on the same estate. The price gap between the two in Tenerife is wide, and the difference in how it feels comes down to something hardly anyone checks when booking: how many houses share it, and how far apart they are.

Sharing with two other families across five acres is nothing like sharing with twelve apartments stacked side by side. In the first case you go down mid-morning and usually find nobody there; in the second, it is a resort pool. Before booking it is worth asking how many units have access, because that number is rarely in the listing.

And there is a middle case that comes out cheap and works well: a shared pool on a large estate, with the house far enough away that the noise never reaches you. That is what we have here, and we set out its drawbacks below.

«Heated pool» is one of those phrases used without explanation. Heating costs money every single day, so ask two specific questions: what temperature do they hold it at, and which months do they switch it on. Some houses heat from November to March and turn it off the rest of the year, which is sensible; others simply put the word in the listing.

In northern Tenerife, from June to October, heating adds little — the air does the work. Where you notice it is December to March, when an unheated outdoor pool stops being inviting even on a sunny day.

Ours is not heated, and we say so before anyone asks. It follows the air and the sun: in summer and autumn it gets used every day, and in midwinter you have to be brave. If you are coming in January expecting to swim every afternoon, you need a house with heating, and there are several on the island.

This is the real question underneath, and it has an answer with numbers. At the official AEMET station in the north of the island, at 632 m, August averages a daily high of 25.7 °C, 269 hours of sunshine and 5 mm of rain. October drops to 22.5 °C and 194 hours of sun, with 47 mm of rain spread over six and a half days. November sits at 19.6 °C, 155 hours of sun and 81 mm across just over eight days.

So: from May to October an outdoor pool in the north gets used, no argument. In November it depends on the day. In deep winter, unless it is heated, it is more scenery than pool.

The south plays a different hand. The south-east coast gets 19 mm of rain in October and 34 in November, against the north's 47 and 81, and considerably more sunshine over the year. If your holiday is the pool and nothing else, the south is the honest answer and there is no more to discuss.

If you plan to alternate pool and beach, this one changes your travel dates. Using the daily Puertos del Estado series for Canary waters since 2005, the sea averages 23.7 °C in October and 22.6 °C in November. August sits at 23.2 °C and July at 22.3 °C.

Water takes months to warm up, so its best moment arrives once the air is already on the way down. The November sea is milder than July's. Nobody mentions it because it does not fit the idea that summer is the best of everything.

And here is another that sounds wrong and is measured: there is more cloud in August than in October. The same northern station records an average of 9.5 foggy days in August and 10.7 in July, against 5.1 in October. The grey lid that blots out the sun in the north is mostly a summer affair.

Pool photos are all taken at the same hour under the same sun. There are three things you can work out anyway, and they decide whether you will be comfortable.

The first is which way it faces. A pool boxed in by high walls, or tucked against a north-facing slope, can fall into shade by mid-afternoon — exactly when you want to swim. If every photo shows shadow on the water, ask what time the sun reaches it.

The second is where the house sits in relation to the pool. If you sleep ten metres away and four families share it, you will hear everything. If there are fifty metres and planting in between, you will not.

The third is the dullest: whether there is shade to sit in. Tenerife's midday summer sun does not let you spend four hours at the water's edge. A pool with no tree, no pavilion and no parasol gets used in short bursts.

The pool at Hacienda Verde is shared by the estate's three houses and faces Mount Teide, which you can see whole from the water on clear days. It is not heated. The estate covers 17,000 square metres, so the houses sit well apart from each other and from the pool: mid-morning there is usually nobody there.

The drawbacks, so there are no surprises: it is shared, not private; the water is cold in winter; and we are at 500 m in the north, which means there are summer days when the cloud lid covers the sun for a while in the morning and then breaks.

What people get in exchange is everything around it: an ethnographic park with a century-old wine press, a threshing floor and old washhouses, Mount Teide twenty minutes away by car and Puerto de la Cruz fifteen. If that sounds like your kind of place, our rural house in La Orotava page has the full details and availability.