Tourists left stunned at size of 'shocking' security queues at Canary Islands airport

There's nothing better than going on holiday, but sometimes getting there and back can be stressful.

This week videos have gone viral as tourists have been left queueing for hours at Tenerife South Airport, and it's been dubbed an "awful" set up for passport control.

All passengers departing on a flight from Tenerife Sur must go through security screening. As part of this, passengers are required to pass through the airport’s metal detector, and people may also be scanned with a smaller handheld metal detector.

But passport control is said to be seeing super lengthy queues lately. Videos show hundreds of people in line waiting to be seen, and the queue doesn't seem to be going down very quickly.

Claire Walters, known as @walters101515 on TikTok, dubbed the situation as "shocking". A user called Scott Story also echoed similar thoughts in his video.

One person commented: "Just came back today and half the plane was empty due to people being stuck in the queue. Absolute joke."

Another wrote: "We were fortunate enough last Friday to get through just before our plane left. What happens if you don't get through on time? How do you arrange another flight and do you have to pay?" A third replied: "We had this a few weeks ago. Stood in that queue for an hour-and-a-half."

Not everyone shared the same experience though, as someone else chimed in with: "This must depend on the time of your flight. I flew home yesterday and we were the only people there. Maybe 40 minutes or so before our flight boarded."

Meanwhile, someone else commented: "I fly to the UK and back once a month. This is not the norm - far from it."

Back last year tourists complained of "chaos" at the south airport partly caused by Brexit. At the time, irked tourism