Few places in Tenerife have a name that says so plainly what they were built to sell. Playa Paraíso, "Paradise Beach", is a resort of the late twentieth century on the western edge of Adeje, next to Callao Salvaje and a few kilometres from the boundary with Guía de Isora. Its history as a town is short. The history of the ground beneath it is not.

Headlands and ravines

Before the conquest this coast belonged to the menceyato of Adeje. The archaeologists who surveyed it between 2004 and 2009 found that people here lived mostly in small stone huts rather than caves, often single round structures on headlands close to the ravines, with a good view of the land around them. They interpret them as temporary shelters or lookout posts for herders watching their flocks; most were reused in later centuries.¹ In western Adeje, outcrops of volcanic glass in the ignimbrite layers were quarried for obsidian, the sharpest cutting material available to the Guanches.¹

After the conquest the coast was a working landscape, not an empty one. The small cove of El Puertito, also called the port of Armeñime, served the western side of Adeje: in the 1520s contracts set it as a place to deliver orchil, the lichen gathered on the cliffs and sold as a dye, and in the following centuries boats from La Gomera came to Adeje for pine timber.²

Tomatoes and bananas

The twentieth century brought irrigation and export crops. In the 1950s and 1960s the slopes of western Adeje were cut into terraces for tomatoes. Many of those fields were abandoned later; others were prepared for bananas in the 1970s and 1980s, in part by Canarian emigrants who had come back from Venezuela.¹ Those terraces can still be seen between and above the apartment blocks.

A plan in 1972

Playa Paraíso belongs to the wave of tourist projects that Adeje approved on rural estates at the turn of the 1970s. Between 1968 and 1973 the municipality, which had no general plan, approved fourteen tourist plans, twelve of them under a circular of the provincial planning commission that allowed special plans for tourism on rural land.³ A special plan for Playa Paraíso dates from 1972; its map is kept in the archive of the Spanish ministry of transport.³ A few kilometres away, Callao Salvaje had been declared a Centre of National Tourist Interest in 1969.⁴

The plans did not turn into buildings overnight. Adeje's planning rules of 1982 still tried to make export farming and tourism compatible; a modification of 1986 removed that protection and reclassified some 751 hectares for development, with room for 85,200 tourist beds, and the coastal strip from Costa Adeje to La Caleta, Playa Paraíso and Callao Salvaje was set aside as urban land for tourism.³ In the 2000s, with Arona almost out of building land, tourist expansion continued westwards into Adeje.³

A town without a centre

Playa Paraíso is not a village that grew into a resort but a resort that grew into a place where people live. Its streets were drawn by planners rather than by paths and water channels, and the archaeologists who surveyed this coast regretted that several small sites recorded in 1988 had already disappeared under hotels, apartments and golf courses.¹ When Adeje approved its first full general plan in 2008, the farmland left in the municipality had shrunk to under a thousand hectares.³ The headlands, the ravines and the terraces are the threads that still tie the new town to the long history of the coast.