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Few towns in the Canary Islands wear their history as visibly as La Orotava. Perched on the northern slopes of Tenerife, it rises from the fertile valley that once made it one of the wealthiest settlements on the island, its colonial mansions and cobbled streets a direct inheritance from the prosperity that followed the Spanish conquest. The town sits at roughly 400 metres above sea level, which gives it a noticeably cooler, greener character than the coastal resorts below, and the views down towards Puerto de la Cruz and the Atlantic are a constant presence.

The old quarter is the obvious draw for anyone arriving for the first time. The streets around the Plaza de la Constitución and the Iglesia de la Concepción are lined with some of the finest Canarian baroque architecture in existence, and the town has been recognised as a national historic monument precisely because so much of it survives intact. The famous carved wooden balconies that appear on almost every postcard of the town are not decorative additions but structural features of the traditional Canarian house, built from local pine and designed to catch the breeze. Casa de los Balcones, a seventeenth-century merchant's house on Calle San Francisco, is the most celebrated example, and an entry ticket gives access to its interior courtyards, craft workshops, and embroidery displays that have been running here for generations.