Las Tablas de San Andrés in Icod: what slides down that street is not what you think
You have seen the photo. A steep street in Icod de los Vinos, cobbles wet with November rain, people pressed against the walls, and someone hurtling downhill face first on a wooden board. The image almost always arrives without explanation, as if it were a prank somebody thought up one night and never stopped doing.
It is not that. What you see is the top layer.
What came down that street before people did
Underneath the fiesta there is a trade that no longer exists. The boards were not built to entertain anyone: they exist because in Icod timber had to be brought down from the woods in the upper part of the municipality to the lower districts. The town's own tourism site says it plainly: the origin goes back to the 16th century and begins "with an everyday job, the transport of timber". When the job disappeared, the movement stayed.
It is worth pausing here, because this is exactly the point where the story usually goes wrong. What came down those streets was the raw material, not the finished product. The timber travelled downhill so that something could be made of it further down. Barrels, if they enter the story at all, come at the end of the road, not on top of the board.
And this is where the sources stop agreeing, so we will say it as it is: the municipal site talks about timber transport and no more, while other popular accounts name a sawmill in the upper part of town and timber travelling towards the coast to build and maintain barrels and boats. The first part is backed by the town council; the second circulates widely, but we have not been able to confirm it in an official source. It seems more honest to tell it this way than to round off the anecdote.
What is certain is the result: every November, Icod repeats the movement of a job nobody does any more.
Look at the underside of the board
If you can only pay attention to one detail, make it this one.
Traditional boards are made of tea wood, the resinous heart of the Canary pine, the part that still smells of resin years after it was cut. And the underside is rubbed with animal tallow, fat, oil or candle wax. This is not decoration or superstition, it is physics. The better the board slides, the faster it goes. That layer of grease is what turns a plank into a vehicle, and it is the part of the fiesta nobody photographs.
Not every board is tea wood today. Plenty of participants also use bakelite, acrylic or fibreglass, precisely to go faster. The tradition is not frozen: it is chasing tenths of a second, like anything else that is still alive.
The night of the 29th smells of exactly that: resin and warm grease, chestnuts roasting on the corner, wine just opened. You hear the wood scraping the cobbles before you see anyone. And between one run and the next, the strange silence of a lot of people holding their breath at the same time.
What we know for certain
The official programme names 29 and 30 November, and in 2026 they fall on a Sunday and a Monday. In practice the fiesta usually takes up three evenings, and the 28th is already part of it: there are boards on the street that night.
There is no religious origin. The fiesta takes the saint's name because of the calendar, not the other way round.
It does not start that night. The children have been practising for weeks in the evenings, on streets with a gentler slope. When the main days arrive the streets are closed to traffic, and you can hear boards coming down until dawn, by then with adults on them.
The streets have a hierarchy. San Antonio is where the celebration began, Hércules is part of the historic route, and Calle del Plano is today the best known and the one that draws the crowd.
It is not only Icod. La Guancha holds it too, and there the street the boards run down bends, which makes the descent harder.
The wine is not an add-on. In northern Tenerife, San Andrés marks the release of the new wine: the bodegas open, the year's vintage comes out, and it is served with chestnuts and autumn food. Icod de los Vinos is not called that for decoration: the wine-growing district around it works with native varieties such as Listán Negro, Negramoll, Malvasía, Vijariego, Baboso, Tintilla and Albillo, within the Ycoden-Daute-Isora Denomination of Origin.
What we do not know
We do not know exactly when the job turned into a fiesta. The municipal source says "later on", with no year, and there is no documented first edition to point to. There is no founding moment either, and no name to attribute it to. It is a tradition that was not invented: it simply stayed.
And there is something we still do not know today: the detailed 2026 programme has not been published. The exact times, the streets that get closed and the sections opened for the boards are released by the town council only a few weeks beforehand. If you are planning a trip, that is the part you will have to check close to the date; we will update the agenda entry as soon as it comes out.
Be wary, by the way, of pages already giving exact times for this year. When we checked them, several were repeating a previous year's programme with the weekdays moved around.
Why it matters
There are fiestas that are preserved and fiestas that are still in use. This is one of the second kind. Nobody keeps it going out of heritage duty: it keeps going because every autumn there are people in Icod preparing their board, judging the grease, arguing about the material. That is why it has not turned into a re-enactment for visitors.
For you as a visitor, that has a practical consequence: you are not going to a show with barriers and a start time, you are going to a street with a real gradient where people come down fast.
If you go to watch
· Stay in the areas set aside for the public and out of the line of travel. A greased board does not stop because you have your camera up.
· Follow the instructions of the organisers and Protección Civil. The safety cover is real: police, an ambulance and Protección Civil are there throughout, and they are the ones who know which section is open at any given moment.
· Go early: the good streets fill up long before the first run.
· Closed shoes with a proper sole. November cobbles are wet and, near the route, greased as well.
· With children, choose the top of the street or the far end, not the middle of the fast section.
And if you go, try the new wine. It is literally the other half of the celebration, and the half that explains why this happens in November and not in any other month.
The question
A trade disappears and its tool remains, empty of purpose but full of people. Icod keeps the movement of a job nobody does any more, and repeats it every November in front of the whole town.
How many gestures like that are still coming down the streets of these islands without our knowing where they came from?