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Search teams in Tenerife are still scouring the Spanish island for missing British teenager Jay Slater <\/b>one week after he disappeared.<\/p>\n
The 19-year-old, from Oswaldtwistle in Lancashire, vanished without a trace while on holiday last Monday.<\/p>\n
Police hoping to track him on Sunday focused on some small outbuildings in a village at the bottom of a ravine, near to where his phone was last traced to.<\/p>\n
Mr Slater has not been heard from since calling one of the friends he had travelled with eight days ago – telling her he was lost, his phone was running out of battery and he needed water. <\/p>\n
Specialist dog teams have also been out looking for him, with much of the search focusing on an area near a national park in north-western Tenerife. <\/p>\n
The teams are working in challenging conditions at Rural de Teno National Park – Mr Slater’s last known location.<\/p>\n
Officers from the Guardia Civil in the Canary island were spotted searching two structures at the bottom of a ravine in the park on Sunday.<\/p>\n
Efforts appeared to be primarily focused on the one area after days of searches in the nearby village of Masca and the surrounding landscape.<\/p>\n
One man who had flown out from the UK to help described his role in the search operation through ravines as like “looking for a needle in a haystack”.<\/p>\n
Mountaineer Paul Arnott, 29, of Flitwick, Bedfordshire, said: “You cannot believe how steep and big an area it is until you get out here.<\/p>\n
“I thought there would be more people searching, though.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Mr Slater’s friends and family have said he had earlier left the group he travelled with in the tourist hotspot of Playa de las Americas, on the south of the island.<\/p>\n
After leaving the NRG music festival at Papagayo night club, the apprentice bricklayer got in a car with two men he had met to drive to the national park in north-west Tenerife.<\/p>\n
In a statement, NRG described Mr Slater’s disappearance as a “devastating situation” that “has deeply affected us all. Organisers continued to “hope for his safe return,” it added.<\/p>\n
Lancashire Police said last week it had offered to assist Spanish police searching for him, but were told their counterparts in Tenerife felt they had enough resources.<\/p>\n
Mr Slater was on his first holiday without family and had travelled to attend the festival with two friends.<\/p>\n
One of them, Lucy Law, is thought to have been the last person to speak to him, said he told her over the phone he had missed a bus and decided to walk the 10-hour journey home but was lost, needed water and only had 1% battery left.<\/p>\n
A fundraising page set up by Ms Law to help find him has gathered more than \u00a330,000 worth of donations.<\/p>\n
Mr Slater’s employer, PH Build Group, said it had deleted a post about the missing teenager on its Facebook page after it was inundated with “negative comments.”<\/p>\n
“Jay has been with us since he left school and is liked by all. He’s a valued member of our team and we stand by him,” the construction company wrote.<\/p>\n
“The fact is he’s a 19 year old lad missing in a foreign country. He needs to be back home where he belongs.”<\/p>\n
The Rural de Teno Park is about a 40-minute drive from where Mr Slater and his friends were staying.<\/p>\n
A remote and wild national park, it is a world away from Los Cristianos and Playa de las Americas, the party town holiday resorts of the island\u2019s south coast.<\/p>\n
Deep ravines and huge daunting mountains make the national park a difficult place for the Spanish search teams to navigate.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n