Things to Do in Canary Islands

Canary Islands experiences, booked with the people who run them

Hiking, sea, sky and table. Local operators, free cancellation up to 24 hours before.

Roque Cinchado with Mount Teide behind it, in the national park on TenerifeTenerife

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Also in the Canaries

Activity businesses on the islands. Not bookable here yet.

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Eight islands, and no two of them alike

Why almost everything runs year-round

The Canaries sit at the same latitude as the Sahara but share none of its climate: the cold Canary Current runs between them and the trade winds blow over the top, and together those two keep the archipelago in a temperate band that barely shifts between January and August. That is why the activity season does not close in winter here — the thing that sets these islands apart from almost any other European destination.

The trade winds do something else, and it explains the landscape: they push a sea of clouds against the northern slopes, where it snags on the mid-altitude belt and keeps the laurel forests green while the southern face of the same island is dry and sunny. On Tenerife or Gran Canaria you can cross from one world to the other in a forty-minute drive, which is why hiking through fog and diving in a T-shirt can happen on the same day.

On the water

The sea runs between roughly eighteen and twenty-three degrees depending on the season, so diving, kayaking and paddleboarding work all year, while surf schools rely mainly on the northern swell and on Fuerteventura and Lanzarote, where the wind is part of the appeal: windsurfing and kitesurfing have one of Europe’s best settings there.

And then there is what you cannot see from land: the channel between Tenerife and La Gomera is one of the few places in the world with stable resident colonies of short-finned pilot whales and bottlenose dolphins, which means whale watching does not depend on luck or on the season. It is also why it is regulated: there is a minimum distance, a maximum time alongside and a blue badge for authorised boats — worth checking that the one you book carries it.

On land

Teide, at 3,715 metres, is the highest mountain in Spain, and the Las Cañadas caldera around it looks like nothing in continental Europe. Reaching the crater requires a free permit, requested in advance and capped daily; the cable car and the viewpoint trails do not.

Away from Teide, each island has its own: the ravines and laurel forest of Anaga and Garajonay, the lava badlands of Timanfaya, the woods of El Hierro, the dunes of Maspalomas, the Tajogaite volcano on La Palma, which erupted in 2021 and is now visited with a guide. And at night, the sky: altitude, the dryness above the sea of clouds and unusually strict sky-protection laws make the Canaries one of the best places in Europe to look up.

How booking works here

On this site the activity is provided and invoiced by the local operator named on each listing, not by us: what we do is put you in touch and make sure the place is held. Prices include IGIC — the Canary Islands tax, which is not Spanish VAT — and can be paid by card when booking or in cash to the operator on the day.

Alongside the bookable catalogue, the directory gathers hundreds of businesses and places across the eight islands from public information, so you can see what exists even where nothing is sold here yet. If one of those listings is your business, you can claim it from its own page using an email on your domain.