Jay Slater shared a key piece of information that would lead Spanish rescue teams to the search area where a body has now been found.
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On Monday (July 15) - exactly four weeks after the 19-year-old was reported missing - the Spanish Civil Guard revealed the heartbreaking news that search teams had discovered a body in the village of Masca, a short distance from where the Jay was last seen alive.
Jay - an apprentice bricklayer from Oswaldtwistle in Lancashire - had been visiting the island of Tenerife with friends Lucy Mae Law and Brad Hargreaves as part of the NRG music festival.
On Sunday, June 16, the trio attended an event at the Papagayo beach club in the resort of Playa de la Americas. However, rather than return to their shared accommodation, Jay chose to stay out with two men he had met a few days earlier - later traveling to the village of Masca to spend several hours at their Airbnb.
After sharing a Snapchat post at approximately 07:30AM, Jay then called both Brad and Lucy Mae and informed them that he was going to try and walk back to their holiday apartment - a journey that would have taken him around 11 hours.
Less than an hour after their final call, Lucy Mae reported Jay missing.
On July 15, a statement from the Civil Guard read: "The mountain rescue and intervention group of the Civil Guard has located the lifeless body of a young man in the Masca area after 29 days of constant search.
"Given the complexity of the case, the discovery has been possible thanks to the incessant and discreet search carried out by the Civil Guard during these 29 days, in which the natural space was preserved so that it would not be filled with curious onlookers.
"All indications indicate that it could be the young British man who has been missing since June 17 in the absence of full identification.
"The first investigations reveal that he could have suffered an accident or fall in the inaccessible area where he was found."
It has since emerged that Jay's final phone call with Lucy Mae could have steered rescuers to the location where the body was found.
Recalling their final conversation, Lucy Mae previously told the Manchester Evening News: "He rang me at about 8 o’clock in the morning saying his phone was on 1 percent, he said ‘I don’t know where I am, I need a drink and my phone is about to die."
Lucy Mae added that Jay had told her that he was thirsty and that he had "cut his leg on a cactus".
Speaking to reporters, Cipriano Martin - head of the Civil Guard's Greim mountain rescue unit - had previously revealed why Lucy Mae's account of her final phone call with Jay was so crucial.
As reported by The Sun, Martin said that the information that Jay had injured his leg on a cactus was a vital clue for search teams to know that the teenager had wondered from main road.
Per The Mirror, he explained: "Masca's been looked at - the Juan Lopez ravine, the Retamar ravine, Las Aneas ravine, Los Carrizales ravine - in all the areas we know he's been in because his mobile phone coverage is undeniable and places him there."
"But we have a difficulty which is that once the phone goes off the antennas stop picking it up, so that while he's walking, and we don't know how long he was walking for, no phone mast is going to detect it, and as the technicians tell us, they look for mobiles and not people, so we're at that point as well, that we have certain information and we have to go on that," Martin added.
"Another of the things that leads us to consider that hypothesis is when he rings his friend Lucy and says he's cut himself on a cactus and he's worried because he doesn't know whether it's poisonous or not, and she tells him not to worry that it's not poisonous.
"But for that to happen you have to leave the road because you're not going to cut yourself on a cactus being on the road and he's had to go into the mountains obviously."
Following the news that a body has been found in the search, donations and tributes have also poured in for the Slater family on GoFundMe.
