Puerto de la Cruz ( Port of the Cross ) is the chief tourist center of the Spanish island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands. It is a popular destination among vacationing Europeans. Despite being the smallest of all municipalities in Tenerife , and despite having lost its exotic status of the past, Puerto de la Cruz attracts close to a million visitors every year.
Puerto de la Cruz became a major tourist resort long before the major tourism boom in the 20 th century. In the early 1900s, physicians in other European countries, such as Great Britain and the Netherlands, started prescribing the warm summer and sea air of Tenerife to their patients. Many of the municipality's oldest hotels date back to this period.
