Los Rodeos is only six miles from the Tenerife capital of Santa Cruz and 12 miles from the popular resort of Puerto de la Cruz and the historic 500-year-old town of La Orotava.

A new VIP lounge opened recently, part of an ongoing programme of improvements soon to include a new transit lounge, new ticket sales desks and the expansion of domestic and international arrivals areas.

Despite being the first airport to open in Tenerife way back in 1930, Los Rodeos was forced to take a back seat as far as tourism was concerned when Reina Sofia airport opened in the south of the island in 1978.

But after a sharp increase in passenger numbers during the 1990s, Los Rodeos underwent substantial modernisation between 2002 and 2005, with a new car park, motorway access ramps, a new four-storey passenger terminal with 12 gates a separate terminal for inter-island flights.

As well as offering domestic and international connections, Los Rodeos has become an important inter-island hub, connecting with all six of the other islands in the Canaries archipelago.

Last year the airport handled over four million passengers.

New services from the British Isles include BA’s Gatwick flights, operated by its GB Airways subsidiary, Ryanair’s from Dublin and winter charter flights from Gatwick and Manchester operated by Britannia Airways.