The father of missing British teenager Jay Slater said "I just want the boy back" as he visited the remote spot in Tenerife where his son went missing on Monday.
Warren Slater spoke just a single sentence for the first time since the 19-year-old disappearance as the search for Jay entered its sixth day.
He spoke to the Telegraph after visiting the remote spot in the north of the Spanish island where Jay went missing on Monday morning.
Together with his other son Zak and eight of Jay's friends, Mr Slater visited an Airbnb cottage near the village of Masca that his son had visited after attending a music festival with friends.
'I'm just exhausted'
Earlier, Jay's mother, Debbie Duncan, told The Telegraph: "I'm just exhausted."
"I haven't slept in five days," Mrs. Duncan said.
"I'm still hopeful. I don't feel negative yet.
"I don't know what today has been like because I've been advised to stay away because I'll just collapse.
'Maybe my boy is out there somewhere.
'We are all devastated. He's an ordinary boy from a small town in Lancashire. These things don't happen."
Speaking to PA, Ms Duncan said she did not know whether Spanish authorities had rejected an offer of help from Britain because they considered it "an insult".
Lancashire Constabulary said it had "made an offer of support to the Guardia Civil to see if they require additional resources", which was rejected by Spanish authorities.
"I believe they said they had enough resources and they didn't need the help of the English police," Ms Duncan said.
Asked what message she would have for her son, Mrs Duncan added: "We just need you home - we just need him home."
TikTok sleuths are joining the search
TikTok sleuths have flown from Britain to Tenerife to join the search for the teenager.
Jay was last heard from Monday morning when he told a friend he was lost in the mountains and was desperately thirsty.
He had previously met two men at a music festival on the Spanish island and followed them back to their cottage.
Police and mountain rescue teams are using dogs and drones to scour the arid landscape in search of the missing teenager, who is from the Lancashire town of Oswaldtwistle.
At least five British nationals each spent hundreds of pounds on plane tickets to make the nearly 2,000-mile journey to help in the search, despite having no connection to Mr Slater.
Paul Arnott, 29, who runs the TikTok account Down the Rapids and describes himself as an 'explorer', spent up to £400 traveling from Fort William, in Scotland.
"It has cost a few hundred pounds so far," he told The Telegraph as he began his first day of searching on Saturday afternoon.
"I've been trying to contact mountain rescue all day, but I can't reach anyone.
"This is the area where he was last seen. The idea is ideally to communicate with mountain rescue services and the police. If I don't get an answer, I do my own thing in this area and try to find where the search hasn't been done.
'I want someone to help me'
"If something happens to me, I want someone to come and help me. I believe that what goes around, comes around."
Mr Arnott has been helped by Andrew Knight, 29, who lives in Tenerife and has lent cars to other British nationals who want to help in the search. Mr Knight said he knew of five people so far who had arrived from Britain.
"The more people watching, the better," he said. "It's a very scary, difficult landscape. It's hard to search and easy to go missing."
The case bears a striking similarity to the disappearance of Nicola Bulley in Lancashire last year, when dozens of amateur social media sleuths descended on St Michael's in Wyre to search for the missing mother-of-two.
More than half a million people have joined a group that has started posting bizarre theories about Mr Slater's disappearance online.
Mr Slater traveled to Tenerife with two friends on Sunday to attend the NRG music festival. He left the festival sometime between 3am and 6am in the car of two other British men he had met that evening.
At 7:30 a.m., he posted a photo on Snapchat of himself smoking a cigarette in the doorway of a house in Parque Rural de Teno, more than 30 miles (48 kilometers) from where the festival was held, south of the island.
At around 8am, Ofelia Medina Hernández, the owner of the two-bedroom Airbnb property where Mr Slater had traveled, came across the teenager standing at a nearby bus stop.
He asked when the next bus would leave for Los Cristianos, a resort where he had been staying, and she indicated it wouldn't be for another two hours. Instead of waiting, Mr. Slater decided to walk.
After he left, he called his girlfriend Lucy Law, who had gone with him to the music festival, and said he was lost, thirsty, had 1 percent battery left on his phone, and had cut his leg on a cactus.
His phone died shortly after the call. The last location was north of the house, near the village of Masca.
It is here that much of the search has taken place over the past week. Mountain rescue workers, volunteers, drones, dogs and helicopters have so far been unable to discover any trace of the teenager.
The search is now focused on two ravines in an area full of scrub and with little protection from the sun.
The punishing conditions did not stop about 15 of Mr Slater's friends and relatives from flying out to help in the search. Some have even collected cigarette butts in the hope that they will prove useful.
His mother and brother have been on the island since Tuesday. "It's just traumatic and it doesn't feel real. It's just terrible, it's terrible," Ms Duncan said. "He's just a great person who everyone wanted to be with. He looks good, he's a popular guy.'
Many more people have joined forces by posting to a Facebook page dedicated to finding Mr Slater, which had more than 468,000 members before it was shut down after conspiracy theories about his disappearance began to emerge.
More than £27,000 has also been raised through a GoFundMe page set up by Mrs Law to "get Jay Slater home".
Lancashire Police said on Friday it had offered to provide additional resources for the search, but said the Guard had rejected the offer because it "has the resources they need".
