The Endemic Plants of Teide National Park

The flora of Teide National Park is one of those rare places where the phrase “found nowhere else on Earth” applies to a startling proportion of what you see. Park estimates vary, but somewhere around half the higher plants in the subalpine and summit zones are endemic to Tenerife or the Canary Islands. This is what happens when an isolated oceanic volcano meets the extreme conditions of high altitude: the species that make it here adapt, specialise, and diverge. They cannot leave.

This article is a checklist for the field. It will not describe every plant you might see, but it covers the defining endemics — the ones you are most likely to encounter on the trails, and the ones that matter most to how the high mountain works.

Seeing the park through its plants

The national park covers the huge Las Cañadas caldera, the cone of Teide itself, and the surrounding pine belt. The elevation range from the lower forest to the summit produces three broad vegetation zones, though they blur into one another.

Pine belt (below the caldera rim): Pinus canariensis, broom scrub, Echium species on clearings.
Subalpine scrub (mid-slopes): Spartocytisus supranubius, Pterocephalus lasiospermus, scattered Echium wildpretii.
Summit zone (upper cone): Viola cheiranthifolia, sparse lichens, scattered grasses.

The boundary between the pine belt and the open subalpine is not a hard line. The retama shrubland begins to dominate where the forest thins, and individual retama can be found high on the mountain where the ground is sheltered. The violet appears in the highest zones, but you will need to climb well beyond the cable-car station to find it.

Tajinaste rojo — the tower of jewels

Echium wildpretii is the plant that stops every hiker in the second half of May. It is a biennial or short-lived perennial that spends most of its life as a low rosette of grey-green leaves, then sends up a single flowering spike that can reach three metres. The spike is packed with hundreds of small, deep-red blooms — each one rapidly visited by the endemic Canary Islands lizard, Gallotia galloti, which climbs the stems to drink nectar.

The species is monocarpic: after that single flowering effort, the plant dies. On a good year (warm spring, enough moisture) the pumice slopes of Montaña Blanca and the lower parts of the subalpine scrub turn red with them. The flowering season is roughly late April to mid-June, but the exact peak shifts with the weather. The tajinaste rojo is famous enough to have been known to the early botanical explorers: the German naturalist Hermann Christ collected it in the 1880s, though the specific epithet wildpretii honours another figure, the Swiss-born gardener Hermann Wildpret, who cultivated many Canarian species at the Jardín de Aclimatación de La Orotava.

The genus Echium is a textbook example of island plant radiation. Across the Canary Islands there are many species, each adapted to a different island or habitat. The red-flowered tajinastes of Tenerife and La Palma are the best known; the blue-flowered ones of Gran Canaria and La Gomera look almost like a different genus. For anyone interested in how isolation drives speciation, the echiums are the place to start.

Retama del Teide — the white backbone of the scrub

Spartocytisus supranubius (retama del Teide) is the shrub that gives the subalpine zone its character. Where the tajinaste is conspicuous in spring, the retama is dominant year-round. It forms dense, low stands of wiry, leafless stems that photosynthesise through their green bark. In late spring and early summer the bush is covered in white flowers with a sweet, slightly almond-like scent that catches the wind unpredictably — you can be walking through apparently scentless air and then hit a pocket of it.

The retama is a nitrogen-fixer, part of the legume family, and it plays a crucial role in the thin volcanic soils. Its deep root system stabilises the pumice and lapilli slopes; its leaf litter and shade create microhabitats where other plants germinate. Where retama is lost (to fire, trampling, or overgrazing) the soil erodes quickly and recovery is very slow.

It is also the plant most visibly affected by the introduced mouflon. The wild sheep, released in 1971 for hunting, browse retama heavily. In areas where mouflon are concentrated, the shrubland is visibly lower and more fragmented. The park service runs control programmes, but the animal is well adapted to the terrain and the pressure continues.

Teide violet — the highest-flowering plant in Spain

Viola cheiranthifolia is the plant that signals you are high on the mountain. It grows only on the upper cone of Teide and on Pico Viejo, at the highest elevations, in loose pumice and scoria that other flowering plants cannot colonise. It is a cushion-forming perennial with small, yellow-centred purple flowers and fleshy, broadly oval leaves that hug the ground against the wind.

This is the highest-flowering plant in Spain — a fact worth stating because of what it implies. At 3,715 m, the growing season is short, the temperature range extreme, and the ultraviolet radiation intense. The violet survives through a combination of dwarf habit, thick cuticle, and the ability to photosynthesise at low temperatures. It flowers from late May into July, depending on the snowmelt.

Finding it requires walking the Telesforo Bravo trail from La Rambleta to the summit, for which you need a permit. You will not see it from the cable-car platform. The plants are small and easy to miss among the rock; the best tactic is to look for the scatter of purple against the pale pumice in sheltered hollows.

Canary Island pine — the forest engine

Pinus canariensis is not strictly a plant of the national park’s high zone, but it defines the park’s lower boundary and is essential to the mountain’s hydrology. The Canary Island pine is a fire-adapted species with thick, fire-resistant bark and the rare ability to resprout from the trunk after fire, rather than relying on seed regeneration. It is also a fog collector: its long needles comb moisture out of the trade-wind clouds, causing water to drip to the ground and recharge the volcanic aquifers. The “horizontal rain” effect is measurable and significant for Tenerife’s water supply.

Within the park, the best place to see the pine belt is around the El Portillo visitor centre and on the TF-21 approaching from the north. The forest here is open, with a sparse understorey of broom and Echium species. Listen for the Tenerife blue chaffinch (Fringilla teydea), which is almost entirely confined to the pine belt and is itself an endemic species.

Threats and protection

Every plant in Teide National Park is protected by law. Picking, digging, collecting seed or cutting is prohibited. The rule is simple: look, photograph, leave it where it is.

The main threats to the endemic flora are three.

Grazing by introduced mammals. The mouflon is the most visible problem, but rabbits also browse seedlings and prevent regeneration in areas where their numbers are high. The impact is uneven (some valleys are heavily grazed, others less so) and the park service adjusts control measures accordingly.

Trampling. The park’s high-altitude soils are fragile. Walking off the marked trails compacts the pumice, damages the root systems of retama and violet, and creates erosion channels that take decades to heal. The trails are well laid out; the main risk is on the summit cone, where the Telesforo Bravo trail is narrow and loose, and the temptation to shortcut is strong.

Climate warming. The high-altitude endemics have no higher ground to retreat to. A warming climate pushes the temperature band upslope, but the summit is a hard ceiling. The Teide violet, in particular, occupies a narrow envelope of temperature and moisture. Modelled projections suggest that the area suitable for it could shrink significantly over the coming decades. This is not imminent catastrophe (the species has survived warmer periods) but the buffer is thinner than it was.

Watching the mountain change

The endemic plants of Teide are not static relics. The park’s history of volcanic eruptions, landslides and climate shifts has forced repeated colonisation and retreat. The current flora is the outcome of that long filtering. What you see on a walk up the Montaña Blanca trail or across the Llano de Ucanca is a snapshot of a process that has been running for thousands of years and is still running — visibly, in the retama thickets recovering from fire and the tajinaste spikes rising from the pumice after a wet winter.

For the visitor, the practical message is simple: take your time, stay on the path, and look closely. The small things are what this place does best.