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Clustered on a small flat shelf base of immense cliffs beside a deep harbour, GARACHICO was, along with La Laguna and La Orotava, one of the first crop of important towns on the island. The town's narrow cobbled streets, rough fisherman's cottages and grand town houses were once part of Tenerife's most important sixteenth-century port, until a series of natural disasters plagued the town and ultimately ruined its harbour. But at least for visitors the results of this drama - lava rock-pools in the town's bay and charming old streets frozen in time - are engaging and picturesque.

Originally both town and harbour grew up on the grant of Genoese banker Cristóbal de Ponte who developed the land that he'd received as payback from Alonso de Lugo for financing the island's conquest. Thanks to a deep natural harbour, the town blossomed as a stop-off for numerous ships to the Americas, and a point of export for sugarcane and wine from the north. But in 1645 natural forces interrupted the good times, when a volcanically induced landslide spread over the town, sinking forty boats and killing a hundred people. Undeterred, the town quickly rebuilt its houses and port, only to see much of it destroyed again in 1706 when two slow-moving prongs of lava crept into town. Though no-one died in this eruption, the harbour was mostly filled in and so rendered useless to large-scale commercial traffic - a death knell for the commercial concerns, which moved on to Puerto de la Cruz to the east. In 1905 an earthquake reminded locals of the continued threat posed by nature, while more recent studies of satellite images have revealed worrying and as yet unexplained subsidence of up to 20cm around town