Playa San Juan is the seaside of Guía de Isora: a small bay sheltered by a headland, a dark sand beach, a harbour full of fishing boats and a town that has grown fast in recent decades. For most of its history, though, it was simply the place where the people of the western midlands reached the sea, and where the sea brought them news, goods and work.

Lava and lookouts

The bay owes its shape to a volcano. The lava flow of Cuevas Negras, which came down past Chirche, Aripe and the village of Guía, ends at Playa San Juan. It has not been dated directly, but it falls between eruptions dated to roughly 900 and 2,600 years ago, around the time the island was first settled.² The Guanches knew this coast well. Archaeologists have recorded rock shelters on the cliffs of La Isorana with a view over the bay, and on the hill of La Tablada a small structure that looks out over Playa San Juan, Alcalá, the cliffs of Los Gigantes and La Gomera, which they interpret as a lookout. On the shore, finds of limpet shells, obsidian and pottery point to seasonal camps for herding, shellfish gathering and fishing.²

A cove for orchil

The earliest written mention comes from the trade in orchil, a lichen that grows on sea cliffs and was sold to Europe as a source of purple dye. In 1520 a contract in Tenerife's notarial records obliged a gatherer to deliver 100 hundredweight of orchil "at the cove of San Juan or at the port of Adeje".¹ For the next four centuries the cove served the dispersed farming population of the Isora slopes. By the early twentieth century the coastal boats that linked the south of Tenerife with Santa Cruz and La Gomera drew their crews from here: the sailors of Playa San Juan and of the port of Adeje were said to be the best in the coastal trade.¹ From 1911 a regular steamer service between Las Palmas, Santa Cruz and La Gomera called at Guía de Isora.¹

The land route was much harder. According to the local historian Marcos Brito, the road from Guía de Isora down to Playa San Juan was built in the second decade of the twentieth century, and the coast road on to Alcalá in the early 1930s.³ Brito also records the industries that grew up on this stretch of shore: a lime kiln, now restored, the salt pans of Fonsalía on the way to Alcalá, and a fish cannery owned by the firm of Lloret y Llinares, now closed.³

Fishermen and footballers

The cannery and the boats shaped village life. When the football club Unión Deportiva Playa was founded in 1947, a few years after the Civil War, its founders were sailors, fishermen and workers, and its players came from the families of fishermen and of the employees of the Lloret y Llinares factory; local people paid the club's expenses out of their own pockets, and a landowner lent the first pitch.⁴ A municipal football ground was only built in 1984, at Agua Dulce, on land donated by Ulrich Ahlers.⁴

Today Playa San Juan is the main town on the coast of Guía de Isora. Its beach has flown the Blue Flag since 2012, and the fishing boats still share the harbour with pleasure craft.⁵ Nearby, golf courses and luxury hotels have been built at Abama; an emergency excavation there in 2001 found the base of a Guanche hut at the mouth of a ravine, a reminder that people have used this shore for a very long time.²