The Funny Side of Tenerife

The pilot of an Iberia flight has been accused by passengers of holding them against their will for over an hour. Flight IB 804 arrived 40 minutes late after a two and a half hour journey but just before landing the purser informed passengers that a member of the cabin crew had left a ring in the toilet and it had disappeared. He told the astonished passengers that under the captains orders, nobody would be allowed to leave the plane until the ring was returned. Despite the furious reaction on board the captain refused to open the doors. The passengers had to be rescued by the police who arrived on the scene an hour later to put an end to their detention. One passenger has threatened legal action against Iberia for the detention.

Every taxi in the canaries makes a loss of some 200,000 pesetas (�800) per year through continual fuel increases, amounting to a total of 1,400 million pesetas a year (�5.5 million) for the whole taxi collective in the archipelago. They claim that fuel costs them around 3,000 pesetas a day (�12), and insurance between 400,000 and 600,000 pesetas (�1600) & (�2300) a year, leaving scant margins for a decent living.

Just a few weeks after the controversy generated by an international journal's predictions that the island of La Palma could split in two and cause a giant tidal wave, the effects of which would be felt across the Atlantic, satellite photos allegedly showed that a 15 square kilometers area south of Garachico  (north-west Tenerife) had sunk a few centimeters. Like the La Palma "findings", the news led to fears that something was about to happen, this time on Teide, Spain's highest mountain at almost 3,800 meters (12,350 ft). Garachico, once a prosperous port, was buried under the lava and millions of tons of rocks which spewed from Teide during an eruption back in 1706. Geologists and experts from the Scientific Research Council have been quick this time to allay any fears of a possible repeat of the disaster. Vicente Ara�a, head of the Council's vulcanology service, said there was no connection whatsoever between the negligible depression detected in the ground and possible activity in the entrails of Mt. Teide. He added that all volcanic activity is preceded by emissions of very specific gases and so far not even tiny amounts of these gases have been detected by the monitoring stations.

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