British tourists are flocking to Amsterdam-style coffee shops in Tenerife

While many Brits have long-since flocked to Amsterdam for coffee shops and cannabis culture, there's a new green destination on the map catching peoples' eye.

The largest of Spain’s Canary Islands, Tenerife, is now attracting British tourists over the buzzing advent of 'cannabis clubs'.

According to Green Tours, cannabis is somewhat legal in Spain yet the regulations surrounding it are 'complicated'.

The outlet states: "The law for cannabis in Spain is complicated. It is legal to cultivate and smoke cannabis for your own personal use.

"However, it is illegal to sell or traffic cannabis. It is also illegal to smoke cannabis in public places, but there are 'cannabis clubs' where members can go to smoke cannabis."

According to the outlet, to join a cannabis club, members have to pay a fee "which is used to grow cannabis and for the upkeep of the club, in exchange for a place to get and smoke cannabis."

With 'over 700' cannabis clubs functioning across Spain, the clubs have a duty to "maintain a strict membership system and restrict each member to a certain amount of cannabis to remain legal."

However, a lot of these rules can be troublesome and confusing for tourists to navigate so one organisation, Weed Tenerife, has compiled a rundown of all the cannabis clubs on the island.

While the social cannabis clubs still remain a grey area within the law, there are a few regulations that have been noted for these various clubs to abide by in order to not risk closure or police intervention.

• Clubs should be located at street level, be closed to the public and ensure no club activity is visible, or odour detectable, from any public area
• Club premises must comply with strict requirements, including minimum ceiling height, adequate smoke extraction and filtering of odours and noise, disabled access toilet, controlled door entry etc
• Members must be over 18 (or 21 in some boroughs), and of sound mind and not in a vulnerable category
• Alcohol consumption or sale is STRICTLY forbidden within clubs, as is the consumption or distribution of any other controlled substance or drug
• Clubs must obtain a Cannabis Social Club Licence from the Spanish government

Twitter user @shottatexts, who has nearly 50,000 followers, posted a mini compilation of some of cannabis clubs that Tenerife has to offer.

They captioned the tweet: "The coffee shops in Tenerife" followed by three fire emojis.

The tweet has since amassed over 379.1k views, with dozens eager to know more about the clubs in question.

One Twitter user asked: "How easy to access are these ? Do you need a connection or can you just walk in off the street?" to which Shotta Texts replied: "Just walk in off the street bro. You need to become a member of the coffee shop which is usually around €10/15. Then you use it like a normal cafe!"

However, others weren't as easily impressed by the post, with one Twitter user replying to the video tweet with: "Decriminalised not legal so you sit in a windowless coffee shop hidden from the outside world and need to balls off anything you leave with to avoid getting jumped on by feds as you leave.

"It's nothing like Amsterdam don't be fooled, calm for me but feels less legal than home," they wrote.

Shotta Texts subsequently replied to the response with yet another piece of footage from their own experience at a cannabis club in Tenerife.

"I don’t know what the f**k you’re talking about bro. All the coffee shops I went to had windows. Never got any trouble from police and I was smoking wherever. The view from this window was the best one."

While the question of legality surrounding cannabis may not be the most straight-forward thing to understand, it is important to note that the sale of cannabis is 'strictly prohibited in any quantity, whether in public or in private'.

Offenders can expect jail time of between 1-3 years for a first offence, or risk more for repeat offenders.

Due to this, guidance maintains that "the only way to acquire cannabis legally in Tenerife is to be ‘dispensed’ the product as a registered member of a licensed and authorised outlet like a registered cannabis social club."