The Canary Islands

Overview

The Canary Islands are Spain’s volcanic archipelago in the Atlantic, roughly 100 km off the coast of southern Morocco and 1,400 km from the mainland, and people come for two things: the mildest winter weather in Europe and seven main islands so different from each other that choosing between them is the first real planning decision. The islands keep their own clock, an hour behind the mainland, so a flight from Madrid crosses an ocean and a time zone at once. More than 14 million foreign visitors came in 2023, which puts the archipelago among the most visited corners of Europe, yet most of them never leave the two or three resort coasts.

The short version of the seven characters: Tenerife is the biggest and most varied, anchored by Pico del Teide, at 3,715 m the highest mountain in Spain. Gran Canaria pairs a real working city, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, with dunes in the south and a green mountain interior. Lanzarote is low, arid and visually curated, shaped by the artist César Manrique, whose lava-tube auditoriums and clifftop viewpoints define how the island presents itself. Fuerteventura is beaches and wind. La Palma is steep, green and freshly scarred by the 2021 eruption. La Gomera holds an ancient laurel cloud forest, and El Hierro is the small, far, quiet one.

Everything here stands on lava. The islands are oceanic hotspot volcanoes, oldest in the east and youngest in the west, and the volcanism is not finished: La Palma erupted for 85 days in late 2021. Teide National Park (UNESCO 2007) and Garajonay National Park on La Gomera (UNESCO 1986) are the two World Heritage natural sites; the colonial grid of San Cristóbal de La Laguna on Tenerife (UNESCO 1999) and the Risco Caído landscape on Gran Canaria (2019) carry the cultural list.

Underneath the package-holiday surface sits a distinct culture. The pre-Hispanic Guanches, Berber-related settlers from North Africa, left words, archaeological sites and a documented genetic trace in modern Canarians. The Spanish spoken here sounds closer to Havana than to Madrid, the potatoes come wrinkled in salt with red and green mojo sauces, and the buses are called guaguas. The islands reward travellers who treat them as places rather than as sunbeds.

History & character

The Guanche islands

People from northwest Africa, related to the Berbers, settled the archipelago around the first millennium BCE and then, oddly, lost the sea: by the time Europeans arrived there was no navigation between islands, and each had developed its own society and its own name for itself. Guanche strictly means the Tenerife people, though it now covers all of them. They lived in caves, made pottery without wheels, mummified their dead on Tenerife and Gran Canaria, and communicated across ravines by whistling, a practice that survives on La Gomera as Silbo Gomero, inscribed by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2009 and still taught in the island’s schools.

Conquest, 1402 to 1496

The Castilian conquest took most of a century and came in two phases: a feudal phase from 1402 led first by the Norman knight Jean de Béthencourt, which took Lanzarote, Fuerteventura, El Hierro and La Gomera, and a royal phase from 1478 to 1496 that subdued the islands that fought hardest, Gran Canaria, La Palma and finally Tenerife. The timing mattered: the conquest finished months before Columbus sailed west, and for the next four centuries the Canaries were the last stop before the Atlantic crossing.

Atlantic crossroads

Cash crops rotated with the centuries: sugar first, then sweet Malvasía wine when Madeiran sugar undercut prices, then cochineal dye in the 1800s. The wealth attracted raiders. The most famous attempt failed: in 1797 Horatio Nelson attacked Santa Cruz de Tenerife, was beaten off, and lost his right arm in the process.

Bananas, Britons and Franco

The late 19th century brought the British banana trade, which turned the islands into a banana monoculture whose descendant, the Plátano de Canarias, still fills Spanish supermarkets. British and German residents also started the first tourism economy, centred on Puerto de la Cruz on Tenerife’s north coast.

The Civil War therefore began, in a sense, here, and the islands fell to the Nationalist side in its first days. The Franco era later built the mass-tourism economy of the 1960s onward, concentrated on southern Tenerife and Gran Canaria. Lanzarote went another way: César Manrique (1919 to 1992) campaigned to keep high-rise development off his home island, with lasting effect on how it looks.

Autonomy, tourism and the volcano

The Canaries became an autonomous community in 1982, with the capital shared between Santa Cruz de Tenerife and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, an arrangement born of a rivalry between the two provinces that never quite went away. Tourism dominates the economy, softened by a special low-tax regime. The islands have also been, for decades, a destination for small boats carrying migrants from West Africa; you may see Red Cross and maritime rescue activity at some ports, and it rarely touches a visitor’s trip in any other way.

The most recent chapter is geological. On 19 September 2021 the Cumbre Vieja ridge on La Palma opened up and erupted for 85 days, the most damaging eruption in the island’s recorded history: over 3,000 buildings destroyed, around 7,000 people displaced, more than 1,000 hectares buried under lava.

See & do

Tenerife

Teide National Park is the headline act of the whole archipelago: a high volcanic plateau of ochre and black lava fields around the cone of Pico del Teide, and the most visited national park in Spain and in Europe, with over five million visitors in 2024. The cable car climbs from 2,356 m to 3,555 m in eight minutes.

Down at sea level, San Cristóbal de La Laguna preserves the original colonial street grid that Spain later exported to the Americas (UNESCO 1999), with the cathedral at its centre. Santa Cruz de Tenerife and its Carnival get their own guide. For walkers, the Anaga massif in the northeast, the island’s oldest corner at 7 to 9 million years, is a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve (2015) of laurel forest and knife-edge ridges described as having the greatest concentration of endemic species in Europe. In the opposite corner, the village of Masca sits at 650 m in the Teno mountains at the head of a gorge; the hike down to the sea is spectacular, strenuous and about three hours each way, so most people arrange a boat pickup rather than climbing back up.

Boats from the south-west coast, including Los Cristianos, run whale-watching trips for the pilot whales and dolphins that live in the channel towards La Gomera.

Gran Canaria

Las Palmas de Gran Canaria has its own city guide; give it at least a day. In the south, the Maspalomas dunes roll over 4 km² of protected sand between the resorts and the sea, with the La Charca lagoon drawing birdlife at their edge. The underrated part is the interior: roads switchback up to the village of Tejeda and the 80 m volcanic monolith of Roque Nublo, whose summit base at 1,813 m looks across the caldera to Teide on a clear day. The Risco Caído and Sacred Mountains landscape in these highlands, with its pre-Hispanic cave sanctuaries, joined the UNESCO list in 2019, and the Cueva Pintada museum in Gáldar (see the history section) is the single best pre-Hispanic site in the islands.

Lanzarote

Timanfaya National Park protects the landscape left by the eruptions of 1730 to 1736, six years of lava that buried a quarter of the island; a smaller eruption followed in 1824. It is Spain’s only purely geological national park, the ground still runs at 100 to 600°C thirteen metres down, and access is deliberately tight: you tour the lava field by coach on a restricted road, and the two footpaths need prior authorisation and a guide. Staff at the visitor area pour water into boreholes for instant geysers and grill food over a volcanic vent.

The rest of Lanzarote is best seen through César Manrique’s work: Jameos del Agua, a collapsed lava tube from the Corona volcano turned into gardens, a pool and an auditorium, opened in stages from 1966; the adjacent Cueva de los Verdes; the Mirador del Río clifftop lookout over La Graciosa; and his own house built into lava bubbles, now the Fundación César Manrique. Add the La Geria wine country, where vines grow in individual pits dug into black ash.

Fuerteventura

Fuerteventura is the oldest island and the flattest, and it is really about the coast: 152 beaches along 77 km of sand coastline, the protected Corralejo dunes in the north, and the wild, road-poor Cofete beach on the Jandía peninsula in the south. Sotavento beach has hosted an international windsurfing and kiteboarding championship since 1985, and the whole island has been a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve since 2009. Inland, Betancuria, founded in 1404 by the island’s Norman conquerors, was the capital until 1859 and is now a very pretty near-village. The islet of Lobos, off Corralejo, makes an easy half-day of swimming and walking.

La Palma

La Palma is the hiker’s island. The Caldera de Taburiente, a collapsed and eroded crater about 10 km across with walls rising up to 2,000 m from its floor, has been a national park since 1954 and holds the only permanent stream in the Canaries. On its rim at 2,396 m sits the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory, rated the second-best site for optical astronomy in the northern hemisphere after Hawaii and home to the 10.4 m Gran Telescopio Canarias, the world’s largest single-aperture optical telescope. In the south, the 2021 eruption site is now part of the itinerary: viewpoints face the new cone and the lava flows that reshaped the west coast.

La Gomera

Garajonay National Park covers 40 km² of the island’s misty heights with the best surviving Canarian laurisilva, the humid subtropical forest that covered much of southern Europe in the Tertiary; UNESCO listed it in 1986 and 18 footpaths thread through it, topping out at the 1,487 m Alto de Garajonay. Around the forest, the island is all ravines and terraced hamlets, and you may hear Silbo Gomero whistled for real, not just demonstrated.

El Hierro

The smallest and westernmost island, once the zero meridian of European maps for 500 years, is the quietest place in the archipelago and proud of it. Its Gorona del Viento plant, opened in 2015, pairs wind turbines with a pumped-storage reservoir in a volcanic crater and has at times run the island’s entire grid on renewables for weeks on end. Diving off La Restinga, near the site of the 2011 to 2012 submarine eruption, is the other draw, along with the critically endangered El Hierro giant lizard, which survives thanks to a captive breeding programme.

Towns & cities

Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

Las Palmas de Gran Canaria is the largest city in the islands and one of the two capitals, with around 380,000 people, the Vegueta colonial quarter and the Las Canteras city beach. It gets a full city guide of its own; go for the details.

Santa Cruz de Tenerife

Santa Cruz de Tenerife is the other co-capital, a working port city with a Carnival that ranks among the biggest in the world. See its own guide; from a regional planning view, it is the hub for northern Tenerife and the La Palma, La Gomera and El Hierro ferries leave from the island it anchors.

San Cristóbal de La Laguna

San Cristóbal de La Laguna was Tenerife’s original capital and is the islands’ finest historic town, UNESCO-listed since 1999 for a colonial grid that became the template for Spanish cities in the Americas. The university keeps the bars full and the average age low.

Puerto de la Cruz

Puerto de la Cruz on Tenerife’s green north coast is where Canarian tourism began in the 19th century, and it still feels more like a town with hotels than a resort. Loro Parque, one of Europe’s best-known zoos, is here.

The resort south

Volume tourism concentrates in two zones: the Los Cristianos, Playa de las Américas and Costa Adeje strip on southern Tenerife, and the Playa del Inglés and Maspalomas strip on southern Gran Canaria, the latter built low-rise around the protected dunes and a fully equipped resort city in its own right. Neither is where you go for Canarian culture, but both deliver reliable sun, and both make workable bases: Los Cristianos for ferries to three islands, Maspalomas for the dunes and the mountain roads inland.

Arrecife and the Lanzarote coast

Arrecife, Lanzarote’s capital, is often skipped and deserves a couple of hours: the Castillo de San José, an 18th-century fort that César Manrique converted into a contemporary art museum, is the anchor. The island’s tourist beds are mostly in Puerto del Carmen, Costa Teguise and Playa Blanca, the last with the ferry to Fuerteventura.

The small-island capitals

Puerto del Rosario has been Fuerteventura’s functional capital since 1859; visitors mostly base in Corralejo or Morro Jable instead. Santa Cruz de La Palma is a small colonial port with old merchant houses along the seafront. Valverde, on El Hierro, is a hill town rather than a port. And San Sebastián de La Gomera, capital of its island with under 10,000 people, has the Torre del Conde tower and one large historical claim.

Garachico and Icod de los Vinos

Two northern Tenerife towns pair well on one drive. Garachico, rebuilt after a volcanic eruption destroyed its harbour, is now known for the natural seawater pools in its lava shoreline. Icod de los Vinos keeps the Drago Milenario, a dragon tree 16 to 18 m tall whose age is estimated between 800 and 1,000 years, probably the oldest in the islands.

Food & drink

Canarian cooking is its own cuisine, not a subset of mainland Spain’s: pre-Hispanic staples that survived the conquest, Atlantic fish, and heavy traffic with Latin America that flowed both ways. Order three things anywhere and you have the base line: wrinkled potatoes, the two mojos, and gofio.

Papas arrugadas are small local potatoes boiled whole in heavily salted water until the skins wrinkle and crust with salt; the islands grow dozens of traditional papa varieties descended from early imports from the Andes. They come with mojo verde (coriander, garlic, cumin, oil, vinegar; the fish sauce) and mojo rojo or mojo picón (dried red pepper, paprika, garlic; the meat sauce, sometimes properly hot). Both sit on every restaurant table in the region.

Gofio is the one to understand before you see it on a menu: flour from toasted grain, a staple the Guanches were eating before the conquest and Canarians never stopped eating. It appears kneaded into fish broth as escaldón, rolled into a dense ball as gofio amasado, and sweetened in desserts.

Cheese is a serious business. Queso Majorero from Fuerteventura, a firm goat cheese often rubbed with paprika, gofio or oil, holds a protected designation and a long prize record. La Palma’s queso palmero is typically smoked; Gran Canaria’s flor de guía is set with thistle rennet. Fish is the daily default on every coast: vieja (parrotfish), cherne, sama and mackerel, mostly grilled or salt-baked and sauced with mojo verde.

Wine deserves a detour on several islands. DO Lanzarote is the photogenic one; El Grifo, founded in 1775, is among the oldest wineries in Spain and open to visits. Tenerife holds several designations of its own, led by Tacoronte-Acentejo on the wet northern slope, with Listán Negro reds; La Palma keeps a tradition of sweet Malvasía. Isolation and volcanic soils spared many island vineyards the worst of phylloxera, so old ungrafted vines are still common.

For dessert and drinks: bienmesabe (almond, honey and gofio paste), quesillo (the local crème caramel), palm honey from La Gomera, and ron miel, the honeyed rum. Coffee culture peaks with the barraquito, a Tenerife layered coffee of condensed milk, Licor 43, espresso, milk foam and lemon zest. The local lagers are Dorada and Tropical, drunk with mild tribal loyalty on Tenerife and Gran Canaria respectively.

Nature

The archipelago is a textbook of hotspot volcanism read east to west: Fuerteventura and Lanzarote are the old, eroded, low islands; Gran Canaria and Tenerife the mature middle; La Palma and El Hierro the young, steep, still-active west.

The eruption record keeps ticking: Timanfaya’s six-year eruption from 1730 to 1736 and a further one in 1824 on Lanzarote, El Chinyero on Tenerife in 1909, the submarine eruption off El Hierro in 2011 to 2012, and Cumbre Vieja on La Palma in 2021.

Four national parks anchor the protected network, each a different volcanic age. Teide National Park is the high-altitude desert of the summit plateau, with endemic plants like the red tajinaste adapted to it. Garajonay preserves the wet laurel forest; a 2012 fire burned 18% of it, a reminder of how fragile a relict ecosystem is. The Caldera de Taburiente on La Palma is the giant erosion crater, formed by a flank collapse around 525,000 years ago. Timanfaya is the raw lava field. Around them sit the biosphere reserves: Lanzarote entire (1993), Fuerteventura (2009), El Hierro (2000, with 60% of its territory protected) and Anaga on Tenerife (2015).

Isolation made the islands an evolution laboratory: a large share of the native flora exists nowhere else, much of it confined to single islands. The fauna list runs from the giant lizards, of which El Hierro’s Gallotia simonyi survives as a critically endangered, captive-bred population, to Tenerife’s endemic blue chaffinch in the pine belt.

Offshore, the deep channels between the western islands hold resident pilot whales and dolphins, watched from boats out of south-west Tenerife year round.

For hikers, the flagship route is the GR-131. On La Palma the trail, nicknamed El Bastón, crosses the island in three stages from Puerto de Tazacorte over the Roque de los Muchachos and down the volcanic spine to Fuencaliente, and the Transvulcania mountain race runs along it. Shorter but equally good walking networks thread Anaga, Garajonay and the Taburiente rim; between them the Canaries are, quietly, one of Europe’s best winter hiking regions.

Climate

The trade winds run the show. The islands sit in the path of the northeast Alisios, which blow most consistently from late spring to autumn and split every high island into two climates. Northern slopes catch the moisture and wear a cap of cloud at mid altitudes, which is exactly where the laurel forests live; southern slopes sit in the rain shadow and stay dry and sunny. That is the whole logic of Canarian tourism geography: the resorts are in the south of Tenerife and Gran Canaria and all over low, dry Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, while the green scenery is in the north.

At sea level the temperature band is narrow and kind. Santa Cruz de Tenerife runs from about 19 to 23°C by day in January to 26 to 32°C in August, with only 226 mm of rain a year, almost all between November and March. Las Palmas is so equable that it is regularly cited as having the best climate of any city in the world, a contested but defensible claim.

The other quirk to plan around is administrative rather than meteorological: the islands are on Western European Time, an hour behind the mainland. Daylight is also more evenly spread over the year than in northern Europe, which is part of why winter days here feel so usable.

When to go

There is no bad month, which changes the question: you are choosing crowds and events, not weather windows.

November to April is the classic season, when northern Europe empties itself onto the southern coasts. Prices and occupancy peak from December to February and around Easter, so book those months well ahead. The payoff is 20-something degrees while home is grey, plus the region’s biggest event: Carnival, in February or March depending on Easter, runs for roughly two weeks in both capitals, and the Santa Cruz de Tenerife edition ranks among the largest carnivals in the world.

May to early July is the connoisseur’s window: settled weather, moderate crowds before the school holidays, and the best conditions for walking in Anaga, Garajonay and on the Teide plateau, where the endemic tajinaste flowers in late spring. Corpus Christi brings flower and coloured-sand carpets to the streets of La Orotava and La Laguna. Día de Canarias, the regional day, falls at the end of May.

High summer, mid July to mid September, is hot but rarely oppressive at the coast; the trade winds do their job, though calima episodes are most likely now. This is domestic holiday season, so beaches fill with Canarian families as well as foreigners. Late September and October give the warmest sea of the year and thinning crowds, and the Lanzarote wine harvest comes off the ash pits around then.

Stargazers should aim for the drier months from spring to autumn, when the cloud cap sits below the summits: the observatories on La Palma and Tenerife occupy some of the best night sky in the northern hemisphere, and the same conditions apply to anyone with a blanket and a car parked above the clouds.

Getting there

Flying is the only realistic way in for most travellers, and the network is dense: every island has an airport, eight in all, and Binter’s map connects them all. Tenerife South is the big international one, built for the resort coast and served by the full spread of European low-cost and network carriers. Gran Canaria and Tenerife North are the two Binter hubs; Lanzarote and Fuerteventura carry heavy northern European leisure traffic; La Palma has a smaller mix; La Gomera and El Hierro are tiny fields served almost exclusively from within the islands.

There is one sea link to the mainland: a long vehicle-and-passenger ferry route between Huelva in Andalusia and the islands, worthwhile mainly if you are bringing a car or a camper rather than as a way to save money. Cruise ships also call constantly at Santa Cruz, Las Palmas and Arrecife through the winter.

One small mental adjustment on arrival: set your watch back an hour from mainland time.

Getting around

Island hopping runs on two systems, planes and ferries, and most multi-island trips use both.

Binter Canarias, the regional flag carrier, flies ATR 72 turboprops between all eight island airports from its Gran Canaria and Tenerife North hubs, with CanaryFly as the smaller competitor; hops are short and frequent enough to treat like buses. The heavily discounted fares you may see quoted apply to Canarian residents only.

Fast ferries cover the busy water. Fred. Olsen Express runs high-speed catamarans and trimarans on the main routes: Santa Cruz de Tenerife to Agaete on Gran Canaria, Los Cristianos to San Sebastián de La Gomera and on to Santa Cruz de La Palma, Playa Blanca to Corralejo between Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, and Las Palmas to Morro Jable. Baleària Canarias (formerly Naviera Armas and Trasmediterránea) duplicates most of the network, usually slower and cheaper, and carries most of the vehicle traffic. The La Graciosa ferry is a separate short crossing from Órzola.

On each island, a hire car is the right answer for everywhere beyond the cities and resorts. Roads are numbered by island (TF on Tenerife, GC on Gran Canaria, LZ, FV, LP, HI, GM elsewhere), fuel is cheaper than on the mainland thanks to the islands’ lower tax regime, and the mountain roads on Tenerife, Gran Canaria and La Palma demand patience rather than skill: steep grades, tight bends, and cloud sitting on the road at altitude on the northern slopes.

Buses (guaguas) are genuinely usable on the two big islands: Titsa covers Tenerife comprehensively, including the routes up to Teide, and a tram links Santa Cruz with La Laguna; Gran Canaria pairs the Global intercity network with Las Palmas city buses. The smaller islands have thinner networks timed around school and work runs; plan around them or drive.

Practical info

For Spain-wide basics (money, plugs, ETIAS, holidays), see the Spain guide. What follows is what actually differs out here.

The time zone is the constant small trap: Western European Time, an hour behind the mainland, the reason every national broadcast ends with “una hora menos en Canarias”. Check it before booking mainland connections.

The sun is stronger than the temperature suggests: these are subtropical latitudes, and a cloudy 22°C day will still burn you. A lot of tap water is desalinated and tastes of it; it is safe, but most people drink bottled or filtered. On the coasts, respect the flag system on beaches, because the open Atlantic sides of the islands produce serious currents; the volcanic rock pools (charcos) built along the northern shores are the calm alternative.

Spanish is the only official language, spoken in a soft accent closer to the Caribbean than to Castile, with its own words: guagua for bus, papa for potato, millo for maize. English is spoken throughout the tourist zones, and German widely in the resorts. Emergency number 112 works as everywhere in Spain; mountain and sea rescue coordinate through it.

On La Palma, the 2021 eruption zone is part of the visitor map but not fully reopened; some roads across the flows remain closed or restricted, so check current access locally before planning a west-coast loop. While we are on the subject: the old “Cumbre Vieja megatsunami” scenario that circulates online came from a 2001 hypothesis that mainstream volcanology does not support, and the 2021 eruption produced nothing of the kind. It is not something to plan around.

Finally, one community note: Maspalomas and Playa del Inglés on Gran Canaria have been one of Europe’s leading LGBTQ+ destinations for decades, and Maspalomas Gay Pride ranks among the largest LGBTQ+ events in Europe. The rest of the archipelago is relaxed in the ordinary Spanish way.