Refugio de Altavista — Hotel in La Orotava

1. You do not need to stay at this place to go to the top of the Teide unless you are:|| Buy a permit (from the website) and take the cable car (3 months in advance). ||2) Pay absolutely nothing and have a good night sleep in your hotel and plan to walk up to the cable car platform before 9am as the staff are there at 9am to stop you if you do not have a permit (which needs to be bought months in advance). This requires some planning and waking up early, but at least you get some sleep (unlike in the refuge)||||Now, If you do plan to stay in the refuge, make sure that you understand the following:||If you take the cable car (this goes to the 3/4 from the base to the top (last one at 3:50pm), then you have to walk down for 45 mins (at least) to the refuge (there are no clear directions to it, just one sign half way through). You arrive around 5pm or so. You hang around the refuge until 7pm when the bedrooms are officially open. It's cold outside, but the noise inside from constant loud talking is challenging the levels of your patience. The people who work there do not ask you to check in when you arrive but do ask you in surprise if you have not yet checked in after watching you sitting there for two hours and catching your eyes a few times. This, apparently important task, is not even mentioned in the two pages of instructions on what you should or should not do there.||At 7pm your bed allocations are revealed to you by calling your name, how this is done is a mystery (my suspicion is that non Spanish speakers are put into the big room with 16 beds). You put the mesh bed sheets (that look like the fake Halloween spider webs) on plastic wrapped mattresses and you finally think that you can rest then, but wait. There are lots of Spanish youths talking very loudly and laughing in the hall until midnight. Banging pans in the kitchen next to the bedroom and drinking wine until midnight is the norm, the people who work there seem to enjoy this themselves and take part in the noisy discussions. The idea of an early night before an ascent for the sunrise slowly becomes an unimaginable dream.||Finally, the light in the bedroom is switched off at 10pm, the very loud noise of people talking and laughing stops around midnight. Bedrooms doors remain opened until then as nobody understands what the rules are. That's 5 hours of laying there, wishing you were asleep. Now, you wish you had those heavy duty ear plugs, as well as a thick eye mask. The altitude seems to heightened your senses, so the whole experience seems 10 times worse than it should be.||Then the heaters are switched on full blast before 10pm, making it unbearable to sleep after an hour or so, so the bedrooms doors are open again as everyone is awake and unable to sleep from the heat. Then, the loud bunk beds squeaking starts and people's phones go off as nobody can sleep (unless you are the lucky one with heavy duty earplugs, snoring very loudly and grew up at high altitude). Why is it so hard to tightened the beds or add some oil to stop them squeaking? Some people here have also mentioned it before. ||At 4am the coffee machine in the hall (the bedrooms doors are open, remember?) starts off as people realise that spending 2 euros on a crap coffee is the best thing you could do at that time. (And I'm glad I followed them later on to make this hell hole more bearable).||4:50 the bedroom light is switched on. Don't bother setting your alarm! You are lucky if you slept for 5 minutes, so now it's the the time to climb the big mountain, 1,5-2 hours to catch the sunrise, it is definitely worth it and surprisingly not as bad as you think it would be.||In the morning (5am or so) you walk back up to the cable car platform (one hour) and then to the top (another 30-45 mins). You have to do this in the dark in the winter, so make sure it's done in full moon (the best) or you have a torch that lasts for two hours.||I don't know if this is different for the local Spanish speaking hikers but for me, the idea of a friendly refuge where you can talk to people (we speak 5 languages between me and my partner) and make friends and have a good rest, was in reality a badly managed, very noisy youth hostel with overpriced water, coffee and indifferent stuff who can't follow the basic rules they made up themselves. Even the toilet seats were broken off the hinges. The whole place feels like a complete rip off. A prison is probably the closest that it can be compared to.||On a positive note, the 4G reception on top of the mountain was better than what you would get in...

The staff of refuge told us that the sunrise was at 7/7.15am..It is true that the first lights were coming up at that hours, however the sun rised up at 7h50am..We arrived at 6h55 on the top, temperature was of -5C and wind blowing at around 30 nodes!! It was freezing, there were about 50/60 people in a very small place, waiting to see sun light in order to have a great view, because otherwise it was almost dark! The problem is that light was never arriving and people were freezing out...After 25 min. we decided to descend, because of freezing! So we had only a partial view at 7h50..We arrived at Cable car at 8am, but the cable car started only at 9am...there was no space to wait, only a bathroom, where 20/30 people entered and waited standing up for 1 hour like beasts!!! Outside was super cold and freezing due to strong winds..Personnel of cable car arrived at 8h50, they didn't open doors of the main building (in order to get us inside out of the freezing) and we were obliged to wait in queue outside in order to get the cable car at 9am...A terrible experience!! When the first cable car arrived, they didn't let me in because I didn't have ticket, although the staff in refuge told me I could go without it and buy it downstairs at the starting point!! After several discussions, we were able to get into the second cable car, but too bad because other people that were offering us a car-lift were gone on the first one! The result is that we had to wake up at 5h45am to see some sunrise lights, not to see the incredible 360" view you have from the top...and all of this, to then wait 1h in a bathroom stack like beasts or dying of cold... If we would not listen to refuge staff we could have woken up 1h later, see some sunrise lights during our walk, arrive on the top and enjoy 360" view with sun and then go back straight to the cable car, without waiting in the bathroom or freezing outside!! The pico del Teide is an amazing place, however this company is handling very bad the organization of it!!! I recommend everybody to go hike till the top, but do it when you have sun light, at least you can enjoy the amazing vie (that I saw one year ago going...

Normally in Europe a Hostel or in this particular case an refuge don't may send you away and has to offer you at least a place to sleep on the ground. As a German I was wondering that for example in Poland you pay less if there is no free bed and you have to sleep on the ground. I believe through the monopolistic position of the Refuge Altavista they think they don't have to offer such thing. We were a group of four and went all the way up on El Teide by foot. As we reached the Refugio Altavista we thought , hey, it has to be like everywhere in Europe so we could at least sleep on the ground to reach the Pico del Teide on the next day, because the way down is far to dangerous to return at this advanced time of the day. Well, that was a wrong conclusion. We asked if we could stay, we offered more money but the only thing the manager showed us were the rules on a green paper and we really were sent away and had to go the dangerous way down at bad sight and risk our lives.

We were very angry and couldn't believe what they told us. Because we had no other option we decided to go down after we had something to eat from our own provisions. So we entered the Refugio Altavista again to stay a few moments in the warmth and eat. But again we were disappointed. They told us we had no right to eat in the Refugio and sent us again away. We couldn't believe such bad hospitality from the spanish and that they were willing to risk human lives.

So we went down a few meters to a windsaver place and ate our provisions just to begin with the dangerous way down. Good for us, we had at least three headlights and we took our fourth comrade in between us. Luckily nothing bad happend and we reached the much saver hiking path on the base of the vulcano.

So altogether you could say the staff cares more about their rules as about...