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You need to live in Tenerife a while to get to know where the shops are for the different types of things you want to buy. Gradually you will come across shops that you like and of course people will recommend shops to you. Its just like moving to a new town in the UK you don’t know where anything is but gradually you become familiar with the area.
A good start when you move to Tenerife is visit Mercadona and Hyperdino for your groceries, you will find them well distributed and will pass one at least once or twice a day in your travels. If you really miss English food you can always call in to Iceland at Las Chafiras but beware the food that you may be used to comes at a price. Iceland not only sells your favourite brands of frozen food and dry goods it also sells magazines, toiletries etc. You would be well advised to convert to Spanish brands of food with the odd treat that you miss otherwise your weekly shop in the UK will seem cheap to your weekly shop here.
If you have just moved to Tenerife there are some useful shopping centres for you to start off with mainly in the North. Firstly there is Carrefour which can be found on the right hand side of the TF-1 at the junction which takes you to the Northern Motorway TF-5. This is about 45 minutes from Los Cristianos. Here you will find a shopping complex over several floors and a supermarket over two floors. The top floor of the supermarket is DIY, Electrical goods, gardening, books, DVD’s etc. They have a really good stock and even sell car tyres and scooters. The bottom floor is the food part of the supermarket.
Also from this exit about 10 minutes away is the Al Campo shopping complex which has another supermarket, clothes shops including C & A, Mc Donald’s and IKEA. Most newcomers seem to head to IKEA to kit out their new home. Some things are quite reasonable in IKEA but you must expect an increase on the UK prices due to the shipping costs.
You will find many shops on Tenerife that are familiar to you such as Marks and Spencer (Santa Cruz) which is very small and probably not quite what you are used to and Makro (Adeje). As you drive and walk around you will see them for yourselves.
The supermarkets here in Tenerife will not be like what you are used to either as they do not carry the vast ranges of products you had in the UK and you cant get ready meals like curries etc. We found that we have to visit a number of supermarkets to get what we want and you need to cook mainly fresh food. One good thing is that things like fish and prawns are really quite cheap.
Clothes shopping can be quite difficult as you can find it difficult to find some of the English sizes as Spanish are much smaller than us. If you are on holiday there are plenty of designer shops to visit but if you are living and working in Tenerife you normally simply cant afford designer prices. School clothes can be very expensive as you cant seem to find them in the shops and have to buy them from the School. The Spanish do not have a School uniform it is just the English Schools that have so there is no real need for the shops to stock them. Most parents bring the uniforms from the UK when they have a holiday as they can be purchased so cheaply from the local supermarket etc.
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