Casa de Platana is a small museum in Icod de los Vinos about bananas. That sounds like a thin proposition until you realise that the banana is the reason this coast looks the way it does.
The crop that built the terraces
Every stone-walled platform between San Marcos and Garachico — the ones you walk through on the coastal path — was built for bananas. From the late nineteenth century the plátano became the north’s dominant export, and the landscape was reshaped around it: terraces cut into slopes, water channelled down from the mountain galleries, whole villages organised around the harvest.
It is also why the north stayed agricultural while the drier south turned to tourism. Bananas need water and shelter from wind, and the trade winds that make this coast cloudy also make it fertile.
The Canarian banana
The plátano de Canarias is not the banana most of Europe buys. It is a smaller, sweeter variety with dark flecks on the skin, grown at a scale that cannot compete on price with Latin American plantations, and protected accordingly. You will see it in every supermarket here, usually beside the cheaper imported kind, costing more.
Once you have tasted the difference the price makes sense.
Worth an hour
The museum covers the history and the current practice with interactive exhibits, and it is pitched at a level that works for children.
Go before you do the coastal walk rather than after. Understanding what the terraces are for changes an hour of pleasant scenery into something you can actually read.