Our daughter has several food allergies and for our summer hols we have found great self catering accomodation, facilities and plentiful dairy free/soya foods to cater for our daughter in Portugal. As Portugal had quite a stormy cold winter last year we are looking for another short haul Winter Sun destination (Tenerife the furthest) that would tick all these boxes. Can anyone suggest good quality, pre-school friendly resorts where there may be a good supermarket or hypermarket that would stock allergy free foods. A big ask I know! Look forward to hearing from you.

Dear Blue Kangeroo

You mentioned Tenerife in your posting, as the furthest you would like to travel.
Please do check out our guide to Tenerife. Many hotels are happy to cater for special diets, as are restaurants, for example El Menor, a surprisingly cheap restaurant with a great atmosphere. Please also take a look at our destination guides, for example, Menorca, Mallorca, Gran Canaria and Lanzarote.

I am unable to comment on the availability of dairy free/soya products in local supermarkets/shops but the following information may help your quest!

The Canary Islands have a long history of cheese making from Goat and Sheep milks. (Some people with an intolerance to cow's milk can tolerate goat and sheep milk, which is much easier to digest, but this is very different from a true allergy.) The most common of which is "fresco" (fresh), just a few days old, without too much pressing and drained on its own. It has a light, pleasant taste, slightly salty with an aroma of fresh milk, unlike the strong and 'goaty' taste which is often apparent in goat or sheep cheese in the UK. There is a large supermarket in El Corte Ingles (a large mall type center in Santa Cruz ).

Slightly more specialist holidays often have a much wider range of natural produce and can be more used to special diets, so the following may be useful...

Aparthotel Venus Albir resort, located in the village of Albir-Alfàs del Pi, near Alicante, with an award-winning Blue Flag beach, has 24 apartments using natural materials and solar power hot water system, an an organic restaurant.

We hope this helps your search. Do please let us know how you get on. This could be very useful for other families with the same issues.

Hello
My 2 year old son has a true milk allergy so we avoid all dairy and egg products. We have visited Tenerife (self catering) and Rhodes (Half board). We found products easy to come by and everyone we came in contact with (shops,restaurants,cafes etc) really helpful and happy to accomodate us.
I took lots of his favourite treats with us and his soya milk (just incase).
We dont even think about his allergy-our only trouble is where can we book for next year!
Hope you find somewhere and i'm sure you will have a great time.
Luv em xx

Hi Em,

Thanks so much for this information. It's really helpful to know what's available in the supermarkets more than anything and this is only info you can get from someone who's been, so thanks. Our daughters allergies are wider than her milk intolerance which causes her eczema, she is allergic to egg, peanut, garlic, pineapple and mustard so this is why we have a harder time sometimes in restaurants as food usually has one of these ingredients in. She also has house dust mite allergy and asthma. I'm sure you'll be the same in that as long as you can find somewhere where you can manage the allergies away from home then it's no problem at all. Thanks again. Jill.

Have you considered a cruise with ocean village, our son cannot have gluten, casein (milk protein) and aspartame ( a type of sweetner) We have just returned from Ocean Village and the chef was fantastic, he made a special meals every day for my son which were great and we had a fabulous time because we had no food worries at all.

Thanks Elaine,

We'd never considered this but it sounds ideal. Did you have to advise the company at the time of booking or did you let them know when you arrived? Did they provide soya milk? Either way they looked after your son's requirements and that's fantastic. Thanks so much for letting me know. Jill