Tenerife. PEAK OF, or PICO DE TEIDE, a famous dormant volcano, the highest summit in the Canary Islands (q.v.), stands in the south-west of the island of Tenerife, and is 12,200 feet above sea-level. The lower slopes of the mountain are covered with forests, or laid out in extensive meadows, yielding rich grass; but the upper ridges and the Peak, properly so called, are wild, barren, and rugged in appearance. The Peak El Piton and its two inferior neighbours, the Montana Blanco and Chahorra (9880 feet), rise from a rugged circular plain of lava debris and pumice, 7000 feet above sea-level, about 8 miles in diameter, and fenced in by an almost perpendicular wall of rock. From the crevices sulphurous vapours are constantly exhaling. The wall of the crater at the top is formed of broken and jagged porphyritic lava rocks, is elliptical, 300 feet in diameter, and 70 deep. The colour of the whole is white. There is an ice cave at an altitude of 11,000 feet. The Peak can be seen more than 100 miles off. In 1795 and 1798 there was volcanic activity here.
See Tenerife, by C. Piazzi Smyth (1858), who made a series of experiments here; Olivia M. Stone (who ascended the peak), Tenerife and its Six Satellites (new ed. 1889); G. W. Strettell, Tenerife (1890).