February is a sound buy in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Highs sit around 21°C, the capital is a working port city where the tram and buses let you skip the hire car, and in most years the month brings carnival, whose parades and street parties are open to anyone with a spot on the pavement. Its dates hang off Easter, though, so they move, sometimes into March, and in carnival week rooms in the centre get scarce and dear. Look up the dates before you look at flights.
The big show is the Coso Apoteosis, the grand parade of floats, comparsas and murgas that usually rolls along the seafront avenues on Carnival Tuesday. The council lines the route with thousands of chairs, and they go to whoever sits down first, so arrive with a sandwich and a book well before the floats. The daytime street party of the Carnaval de Día is gentler on anyone with children than the night-time crush around Plaza de España.
Stay for Ash Wednesday if you can. The Burial of the Sardine is a mock funeral in which a giant papier-mâché sardine is carried through the streets, followed by a crowd of wailing widows, most of them men in mourning dress, and then set on fire.
The smart money sleeps up the hill in La Laguna, the old university city at the far end of tram Line 1, and Metrotenerife adds extra and double trams during carnival. Pack a costume, too. Most of the crowd will be in fancy dress, and buying one in carnival week means paying carnival-week prices.
For everything else, buy a ten+ card at the bus station or a tram stop. It takes a good slice off the cash fare on TITSA's buses and the tram, but on the buses you need to tap it again as you get off, or you may be charged for the whole route. Use it on a non-carnival day for the 910 from the bus station to Playa de Las Teresitas, nearly a kilometre of golden sand shipped in from the Sahara in the 1970s, with the Anaga hills behind it and cafés and toilets at the back of the beach.