Just a few weeks after the launch of the new tram service that connects the island capital of Santa Cruz with the neighbouring town of La Laguna, the island bus operator, TITSA, has announced a raft of improvements to services in the north of the island.

The frequency of services between the northern town of Icod de los Vinos and Santa Cruz (service 106) has been boosted by an additional eight journeys a day.

Line 363, which runs from Puerto de la Cruz to Buenavista del Norte has been increased from an hourly to a half-hourly service.

In Los Realejos, the new service will operate between San Vicente and Las Llanadas.

The company is pledged to develop more routes to meet government demand to get commuters, shoppers and visitors to the island out of cars and on to public transport.

TITSA island has a reputation for providing cheap and efficient bus services across the island.

The news came on Thursday June 28, several days earlier than expected, bringing a swift end to an anxious period of waiting for the island authorities.

World Heritage status for Mount Teide means that the tiny island now has two favoured sites recognised by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

San Cristobal de La Laguna was admitted to UNESCO’s list of World Heritage sites in 1999 as ‘the first non-fortified Spanish colonial town; its layout provided the model for many colonial towns in the Americas.’

In all, 37 sites around the world were under consideration at the 31st UNESCO world heritage convention in Christchurch, New Zealand. But Teide’s case was given the substantial boost of a recommendation by the World Conservation Union (World Conservation Union boosts Teide bid).

Two other sites were also granted the favoured accolade – the Karst region in southern China and the volcano and lava tubes in Jeju, South Korea.

In the drive for reduced emissions and cleaner sources of energy, ‘hot rock’ or, more precisely, geothermal technology has been largely ignored.

Yet its potential to provide mankind with an environmentally-friendly and economically-viable energy available on a worldwide scale is immense.

Geothermal technology involves the mechanically simple process of injecting water into a borehole several kilometres deep, where the temperature can be over 250C.

The superheated water is then retrieved through one or more other boreholes.

Keeping it under pressure prevents it from becoming steam so that any material dissolved in the water can be filtered and returned to the ground.

At the surface the water is passed through a heat exchanger to extract most of the heat, which is then used to drive a turbine to generate electricty.

The cooled water is returned to the injection borehole to start the cycle over again.

What makes Tenerife an attractive proposition for exploring this basic technology is that the hot rocks are much nearer the surface.

An Australian company, Petratherm, has secured a licence from the Canary Islands government to operate on Tenerife.

The firm’s managing director, Terry Kallis, says the islands lie on top of “super-hot volcanic structures at relatively low depth”.

Temperatures of over 300C are often found at depths of as little as two kilometres in active volcanic areas, half the depth of usual drilling operations.

Petratherm’s exploration licence covers large areas in the north and north east of the island.

Late spring and early summer is Tajinaste time up on Mount Teide, a time when the wild and rugged mountain landscape is briefly tamed by the blooms of a number of brightly coloured plants, most of which are endemic to the island of Tenerife.

Tajinaste rojo, or Echium wildpretii to give it its correct name, is the most spectacular, a species of bugloss which can grow to over 10ft tall.

Echium is a genus of around 60 species of flowering plant which flourish across Africa, Europe, Madeira and the Canary Islands. Some species are also found in east Asia and Australia.

The sub-alpine zones of the ravines around Mount Teide are the native habitat of the Tajinaste variant, which thrives under the hot sun and the arid and dry conditions there. It can also tolerate temperatures as low as -5C.

A herbaceous biennial, the Tajinaste’s two-year cycle sees it form a dense cluster of leaves in its first growing season, followed by tall and thick stems of bright red flowers in its second year.

Round about now is the perfect time of year to see the Tajinaste in its full glory, along with a host of other colourful and exotic plants endemic to Las Cañadas del Teide, the huge caldera that surrounds the volcanic peak.

Mindful, however, that there aren’t nearly as many trees on the island as there used to be, the island authorities have announced a programme of reforestation that will see over a million trees planted in the coming months to cover an area of over 60 hectares, roughly the area that 150 football pitches would occupy.

The trees will be of two ancient species common throughout the Canarian archipelago, the Canarian pine and laurisilva.

The forests are important to the ecosystem of Tenerife, helping to prevent soil erosion and drawing moisture from the clouds to replenishing the island’s network of water underground water reserves.

They would like to see the protected area cover all of the Macaronesia islands – the collective name for the five volcanic archipelagos of the Azores, Madeira and Salvages (Portuguese), the Canaries (Spanish) and Cape Verde (independent).

The proposal will be discussed at an International Conference for the Protection of Dolphins in Tenerife in November.

The conference is one of a series of worldwide events being held to mark the International Year of Dolphins, with representatives attending from Spain, Portugal and African countries.

The dolphin campaign is an initiative of UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation.

It has the enthusiastic backing of the Loro Parque Foundation in Puerto de la Cruz, Tenerife, which has launched a range of events aimed at raising the interest of school children in whale-watching trips and scientific research into marine mammals, and to motivate students to support conservation and protection.

The President of the Loro Parque Foundation, Wolfgang Kiessling, is backing the Canarian government call, emphasising the need for a large protected area in the Atlantic Ocean to ensure the survival of dolphins and small marine mammals.

Ahead of the November conference, the Canarian government is consulting various interest groups such as boat owners, tourist operators, protection groups and environmental organisations on this and other conservation activities.

The 12-strong team left the island capital of Santa Cruz aboard the new British research ship, RRS James Cook, to examine an area some 2,000 nautical miles south west of Tenerife where the earth’s mantle is exposed to the sea floor.

Their investigations will be made possible by the latest high-tech equipment on board the new vessel, including a robotic device called Toby, which will extract rock samples at the site and film for the first time the planet’s ‘green’ interior.

The hole is some 16,000 feet below the ocean’s surface and located along a globe-spanning ridge of undersea volcanoes where the Atlantic tectonic plates have separated.

Normally, lava surges up to fill such gaps in the earth’s crust, but in this case instead of a layer of crust several kilometres thick the mantle of the earth, a very dense leafy-green rock that makes up the core of the Earth, has been exposed.

Scientists are puzzled by the appearance of this ‘open wound’ on the ocean floor, which was first detected by sonar readings taken by a surface vessel. The phenomenon defies conventional theories about how the Earth works.

The area to be studied by the scientific team is part of an underwater mountain range that spans thousands of square miles. The hole itself is reckoned to be between 10,000-13,000 feet in diameter.

The largest solar energy plant in the world will soon to be in full production at Granadilla de Abona in the south of the island, contributing enough energy to the island electricity grid to power 10,000 homes.

Sunshine is never in short supply on the island and the regional government is hoping that by the year 2015 as much as 30 per cent of the electricity used in the Canary Islands will be generated using wind and solar technology.

The new Granadilla plant has 200 solar panels, each designed to produce 20 megawatts though early tests have shown them to be producing around 30 per cent more than predicted.