Explore the real-world places that appear in Donkey Belly by Andrea Abreu. Each location on the map shows what happens there in the novel, the real history of the place, and what's there today. Featured locations include Punta del Hidalgo, La Orotava, The Banana Plantation, The Narrator's Home, Isora's House and 7 more.
Northern coast of Tenerife — village by the sea where the novel is anchored
The unnamed coastal village at the novel's heart — modeled closely on Punta del Hidalgo and the northern villages of Tenerife — is the suffocating world from which the narrator and her best friend Isora dream of escaping. The ocean is ever-present but rarely liberating, a boundary that defines their small, rain-damp lives under the perpetual gray sky the girls call 'panza de burro,' the donkey belly cloud that caps the north of the island.
Punta del Hidalgo is a small fishing and agricultural village at the northeastern tip of Tenerife. Settled during the Spanish colonization of the Canary Islands, it remained a quiet, working-class community tied to the sea and banana plantations well into the twentieth century.
Punta del Hidalgo is a quiet village with rocky volcanic beaches and a natural saltwater pool. It draws visitors seeking the rugged northern coast away from the southern resorts, and retains much of the working-class character Abreu depicts.
Visit: Punta del Hidalgo Natural Pools (park)
Historic inland town — the broader cultural world surrounding the narrator's village
La Orotava and its surroundings form the social and geographic backdrop of the novel. The narrator moves through a world defined by the particular class geography of the Canarian interior — where banana workers, domestic laborers, and schoolgirls share cramped streets and complicated silences. The town represents a modest aspirational center just beyond the village's reach, glimpsed on rare outings.
La Orotava is one of the most historically significant towns in the Canary Islands, founded in the sixteenth century and known for its beautifully preserved colonial architecture, Baroque churches, and the elaborate sand carpets of Corpus Christi. It served as a key agricultural and administrative hub for the island's interior.
La Orotava is a major cultural tourism destination in Tenerife, famous for its historic center, the Casa de los Balcones, and its proximity to Teide National Park. Its colonial streets and local markets remain vibrant.
Visit: Casa de los Balcones (historic site)
Northern slopes of Tenerife — the landscape of labor and enclosure
The banana plantations under their plastic sheeting are one of the novel's defining images. The narrator's world is saturated with the smell and heat of the invernaderos — the greenhouse tunnels — where the island's working-class families toil. The plastic canopy mirrors the donkey belly cloud above, creating a double enclosure of sky and labor. The girls run alongside fences of these plantations, and the landscape shapes their sense of confinement and class.
Banana cultivation became the dominant agricultural industry of the Canary Islands in the late nineteenth century, transforming the northern slopes of Tenerife into a landscape of terraced plantations. The use of plastic greenhouse tunnels intensified from the mid-twentieth century onward to protect crops and extend growing seasons.
Banana plantations continue to cover much of the northern and western slopes of Tenerife. The industry remains economically important, and the characteristic blue or white plastic sheeting of the invernaderos is one of the most visible features of the island's agricultural landscape.
Village house — the domestic world of shame and family tension
The narrator's house is a space of claustrophobic intimacy, shame, and bodily consciousness. She watches her mother navigate the rituals of domestic femininity — dieting, dressing, performing — and begins to internalize and violently reject these models. The home is where her obsession with Isora grows in private, where she rehearses imaginary conversations and where her desire and self-loathing ferment side by side.
The modest concrete homes of northern Tenerife's working-class villages were largely built during Spain's mid-twentieth-century development boom. Many families in these communities depend on agricultural labor, domestic service, and small commerce, and the architecture reflects a functional, unadorned way of life.
The residential streets of Tenerife's northern villages like Punta del Hidalgo retain their working-class character, with small houses, vegetable gardens, and quiet lanes that stand in sharp contrast to the tourist infrastructure of the south.
Neighbor's home in the village — the site of the novel's central desire
Isora's house is the magnetic center of the narrator's existence. It is here that the two girls spend their afternoons — playing, fighting, testing the limits of their bodies and their bond. The narrator's obsessive love for Isora, which the novel renders with extraordinary rawness, crystallizes in the domestic spaces they share: bedrooms, patios, bathroom tiles. Isora is wilder, bolder, and more reckless, and her home feels to the narrator like both sanctuary and threat.
The tightly knit social geography of small Canarian villages means that neighbors often live within meters of one another, their lives deeply entangled through family ties, shared labor, and communal gossip. This proximity has shaped the island's particular culture of intimacy and surveillance.
Small working-class homes in northern Tenerife continue to be the primary residences for families connected to the agricultural and service sectors of the island's economy.
Local school — the social arena of childhood cruelty and class awareness
The school is where the narrator's world expands beyond Isora, and where the cruelties of childhood hierarchy are enacted with full force. Class distinctions, body shame, and the humiliations of girlhood play out in the classrooms and playgrounds. The narrator watches Isora navigate social hierarchies with a brazenness she herself cannot muster, simultaneously admiring and resenting her best friend's power over other children.
Public schooling in the Canary Islands expanded significantly during the post-Franco democratic transition of the late 1970s and 1980s. Many small northern villages received their first proper school facilities during this period, fundamentally changing the educational landscape for working-class children.
Public elementary and secondary schools operate in the villages of northern Tenerife. Education is compulsory and free, though rural schools often face challenges of underfunding and student migration toward urban centers.
Anaga Rural Park — the primordial green world above the village
The laurisilva forest of the Anaga massif looms over the northern coast of Tenerife as a dark, humid presence — the primordial landscape that gives the novel its central atmospheric image. The 'panza de burro,' the thick cloud belt that clings to the northern slopes and never seems to lift, is the meteorological reality of this zone, and it becomes the novel's ruling metaphor: a world perpetually overcast, damp, enclosed, and beautiful in its oppressiveness.
The Anaga Rural Park contains one of the last remaining ancient laurel forests in the world — a remnant of the subtropical forests that covered much of southern Europe and North Africa millions of years ago. The area was designated a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve and is considered one of the most biodiverse regions in the Macaronesian archipelagos.
Anaga Rural Park is a major hiking and ecotourism destination in Tenerife, with trails through dense laurisilva, dramatic coastal cliffs, and traditional Guanche settlement sites. The park's cloud-draped ridges remain one of the most atmospheric landscapes in the Canary Islands.
Visit: Anaga Rural Park (park)
Northern Tenerife coastline — the girls' arena of daring and escape
The volcanic rocky beaches of the northern coast are where the narrator and Isora play out their most charged moments together — daring each other, testing physical limits, feeling the pull of something they cannot yet name. Unlike the tourist beaches of the south, these dark volcanic shores are rough, cold, and local. They are not spaces of pleasure but of endurance, belonging entirely to the girls' world rather than the adult tourist economy.
The northern coast of Tenerife is characterized by rugged volcanic rock formations, strong Atlantic swells, and natural pools carved from the lava. These beaches were historically used by fishermen and locals, having little appeal to the tourist trade that gravitated toward the calmer, sandy southern shores.
The rocky northern coast attracts local swimmers, surfers, and hikers. Natural lava pools in villages like Punta del Hidalgo and Bajamar provide calmer swimming conditions and are popular with residents and day-trippers seeking an alternative to the crowded southern resorts.
Visit: Piscinas de Bajamar (park)
Local bar in the village — adult world of gossip, machismo, and routine
The bar and social spaces of the village represent the adult world the narrator observes with a mixture of dread and fascination. Men drink and play cards; women exchange gossip in doorways. The rituals of small-town life — who is seen with whom, who has gotten fat, who has left — constitute the social fabric that constrains everyone. The narrator absorbs this world's logic of surveillance and judgment, understanding that her own body and desires will eventually be subject to the same scrutiny.
The local bar has functioned as the center of social life in Canarian villages for generations, particularly among working-class communities. In small towns without cinemas or cultural venues, the bar served as meeting place, news exchange, and the primary site of community identity.
Village bars remain the social hearts of small Canarian communities, serving local coffee, spirits, and traditional tapas. In northern Tenerife's quieter villages, they are often family-run establishments that open early for workers and remain central gathering points throughout the day.
Visit: Local village bar (Punta del Hidalgo) (restaurant)
Island capital — the distant, aspirational city beyond the village
Santa Cruz represents the urban world that exists at the edge of the narrator's imagination — a place of departure, possibility, and a modernity utterly foreign to the village's rhythms. The city figures as the destination of those who escape, who study, who become something other than what the village expects. For the narrator and Isora, it is both a dream and a rebuke — proof that other worlds exist and that reaching them requires a rupture with everything familiar.
Santa Cruz de Tenerife has been the administrative capital of the island since the eighteenth century and became one of the most important port cities in the Atlantic, serving as a refueling stop on routes between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Its Carnival is among the most famous in the world.
Santa Cruz is a modern Spanish city of around 200,000 people, home to the island's university, major commercial centers, and cultural institutions including the Auditorio de Tenerife designed by Santiago Calatrava. It remains the economic and administrative center of the island.
Visit: Auditorio de Tenerife (landmark)
TF-13 highway — the passage through the novel's landscape
The narrow roads that wind along Tenerife's northern coast — between villages, past banana groves, beneath the low gray cloud — are where the novel's characters move between worlds. Car journeys become charged with meaning: the back seat is a space of childhood daydreaming, of overhearing adult conversations, of watching the green, wet landscape scroll past. These roads are the connective tissue of the novel's geography, neither origin nor destination but the in-between.
The northern coastal road of Tenerife was developed and improved throughout the twentieth century to connect the island's agricultural villages to the capital. Before road construction, many of these communities were accessible only by mule track or sea.
The TF-13 and related roads continue to serve as the primary routes connecting the northern villages of Tenerife. The drives along these roads, with views of banana plantations, cloud-capped mountains, and the Atlantic, are considered among the most scenic on the island.
Teide volcano — the island's spine, seen from below but never reached
El Teide is never far from the consciousness of anyone on Tenerife, and in the novel it functions as an almost mythological presence — the island's great spine, visible from the north as a ghost above the cloud layer. The narrator's world is bounded below by the sea and above by the donkey belly cloud; Teide exists somewhere beyond and above both, belonging to a different register of existence entirely, monumental and indifferent to the small lives played out on the coast below.
Mount Teide, at 3,715 meters, is the highest peak in Spain and the third-largest volcano in the world measured from the ocean floor. The Guanche indigenous people considered it sacred, believing it to be the home of Guayota, the god of evil. It has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2007.
Teide National Park receives over four million visitors per year, making it one of the most visited national parks in the world. A cable car runs near the summit, and the park's otherworldly volcanic landscape is one of Spain's premier natural attractions.
Visit: Teide National Park (park)
More by Andrea Abreu: All Andrea Abreu books
Other nearby maps: Bingo Has Been Called by Lana Corujo locations map