Canary Islands guides
How the Teide permit works, when an excursion gets cancelled and where the bus actually picks up. What you need to know before booking.
For any island (2)
Cancellations: swell, calima and wind
Excursions in the Canaries get cancelled more often than people expect, and almost never through poor organisation. Heavy swell, calima, wind at altitude or closure of the Teide access are real and frequent reasons. This guide explains what happens to your money in each case.
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The pickup point, without surprises
An excursion in the Canaries collects from fifteen or thirty different points before it really sets off. Most problems with a booking are not about the operator or the price: they are about somebody waiting at the wrong door. Here is how it works.
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Tenerife guides (5)
The Teide crater permit, explained
Climbing the final 163 metres of Mount Teide, the Telesforo Bravo trail, requires a permit. From 2026 there is also an eco-fee. This guide covers the quota, the deadlines and the two ways to sort it out, because this is the paperwork that ruins most trips by being left too late.
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The cloudy north and the sunny south, explained
It is the question that most baffles new arrivals: it is raining in Puerto de la Cruz while 70 kilometres away, in Los Cristianos, not a drop has fallen. This is not chance or bad luck. It is the trade wind meeting a 3,715-metre mountain, and knowing it changes where you book each excursion.
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Anaga, the forest that drinks from fog
The Anaga massif, at the north-eastern tip of Tenerife, is a Unesco Biosphere Reserve. What you visit there is not just any forest: it is laurisilva, a kind of jungle that vanished from Europe millions of years ago and survives here because the fog gives it water.
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Atlantic swell, and why it cancels trips in fine weather
This is the cancellation that annoys people most, because they look at the sea from the promenade, see it flat and cannot make sense of it. Swell is invisible from the shore and has nothing to do with that day’s wind: it comes from a storm that may be a thousand kilometres away.
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Without the crater permit, what do you actually miss?
The quota for the crater trail sells out weeks ahead and many people write off the Teide trip altogether. That is an expensive misunderstanding: what needs authorisation is the final 163 metres. The national park, the cable car and the high viewpoints need no permit.
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Gran Canaria guides (5)
Eight climates in fifty kilometres
The phrase appears in every brochure and sounds like a slogan. It has a concrete physical basis: the island is a nearly circular cone about 50 kilometres across, rising to 1,949 metres in the centre. That shape manufactures the contrasts, and it is why one day of driving takes you from desert to forest.
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Roque Nublo, and why the photo misleads
It is the silhouette that identifies Gran Canaria: a rock monolith in the centre of the island, at around 1,800 metres. The climb is short, and that is exactly what throws people, because the problem is not the trail: it is the altitude, the sun and the temperature change from the coast.
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The dunes are not a big beach
They look like an extension of the beach and they are not: they are a Special Nature Reserve, a system of moving sand that degrades when people walk where they should not. Knowing where to go is not bureaucratic box-ticking, it is the difference between visiting them and damaging them.
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Guayadeque, the inhabited ravine
It is one of the deepest ravines on Gran Canaria, and it is not a closed archaeological site: there are cave houses **lived in today**, cut into the volcanic rock. The visit makes far more sense once you know why people lived this way, because it was not poverty: it was climate engineering.
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Where to sleep on Gran Canaria, and why it changes the trip
The island is radial, so almost anywhere puts everything within a day trip. But where you sleep decides how much time you spend on the road, what weather you get at breakfast and which excursions are within easy reach. These are the real differences, unvarnished.
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Lanzarote guides (5)
Timanfaya, and why you visit it by coach
This is the disappointment waiting for anyone who arrives expecting trails: in Timanfaya National Park you do not walk where you like. The main visit follows a closed route, by vehicle. It is not a commercial decision, and it is worth understanding why before you go, because it changes what you should expect from the day.
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The hollows of La Geria, explained
It is the strangest farming landscape you can see in Europe: thousands of hollows dug into black volcanic ash, each with a vine at the bottom and a semicircular stone wall beside it. It is not decorative. It is an irrigation system without water, and it works.
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The lava tube that crosses northern Lanzarote
Cueva de los Verdes and Jameos del Agua are not two caves: they are two stretches of the **same** underground conduit, one of the longest known lava tubes. Understanding what a tube is changes entirely what you see inside.
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Papagayo, the dirt track and the hire car
These are the most photographed coves in Lanzarote and they sit inside a protected area, the Los Ajaches Natural Monument. That has a practical consequence which surprises many people on arrival: the surfaced road ends and a dirt track begins.
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The island with an aesthetic rule, and who imposed it
The first thing you notice on landing is what is missing: high-rises, giant billboards, cables across façades. This is not chance or lack of money. It is a landscape policy sustained for decades, and it explains why the whole of Lanzarote is a Biosphere Reserve.
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Fuerteventura guides (5)
The Fuerteventura wind, and how to use it in your favour
It is not a run of bad luck or a bad season: in Fuerteventura the wind is the climate. The island is the oldest in the archipelago and therefore the most eroded and the flattest, and with no mountains to slow the trade wind, it comes in and finds nothing to stop it.
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Cofete: the beach that makes you read your hire contract
Cofete sits on the Jandía peninsula at the southern tip of Fuerteventura, and it is one of the most striking beaches in the archipelago: kilometres of sand open to the Atlantic with the massif behind. Getting there has one requirement, and it is not distance: it is the track.
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Lobos: the islet with a visitor cap
Lobos is an islet between Fuerteventura and Lanzarote, a short hop from Corralejo, and it is a Natural Park. What surprises people who discover it on the spot is that **you cannot simply turn up and walk in**: access is limited by a daily quota and must be authorised in advance.
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The Corralejo dunes, and the origin of the sand
In northern Fuerteventura there is a field of pale sand dunes against the sea, protected as a Natural Park. The question almost nobody asks, and the one that explains the place, is where that sand comes from: it was not blown in from the Sahara, as people repeat.
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Currents in Fuerteventura, and what a lifeguard looks at
Fuerteventura has kilometres of beach open to the Atlantic, and that openness is exactly why swimming is not the same on all of them. Here it is not the surf you should look at first: it is rip currents, which are invisible and are the usual cause of rescues.
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La Palma guides (5)
The La Palma sky, and why it is protected by law
La Palma does not have one of the world’s best skies by chance, nor purely because of altitude. It has three things that almost never coincide: a 2,426-metre mountain, the sea of clouds below acting as a lid, and a law limiting outdoor lighting since 1988. The three together are the difference.
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After Tajogaite: what you see and how to visit it
The 2021 eruption on Cumbre Vieja lasted almost three months and redrew the map of the island’s west. Four years on, the sensible question is not whether you can travel to La Palma — you can, and the island lives on tourism — but which area is affected and how to visit something like this without turning it into a spectacle.
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The Caldera, and why distance misleads
The Caldera de Taburiente is an enormous erosion basin in the centre of La Palma, and it is a National Park. The mistake that causes most rescues in places like this is not getting lost: it is planning the route by kilometres. Here what counts is vertical gain, and going down is the easy half.
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The northern forest, and why La Palma has water
La Palma is «the beautiful island» for a measurable reason: it is the wettest in the archipelago. And that moisture does not come from rain alone, it comes from the north-eastern forest. Los Tilos is a Biosphere Reserve and the place where the system that keeps the island green makes sense.
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Reaching La Palma: plane, ferry and what decides the day
La Palma is not a direct-connection island from anywhere in Europe, and that shapes the trip more than people allow for. There are two routes — plane and boat — and both have a local peculiarity worth knowing before you buy tight tickets.
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La Gomera guides (5)
Garajonay, a Tertiary forest that is still alive
Garajonay National Park covers the high ground of La Gomera and is a Unesco World Heritage Site. What is protected is not the scenery: it is that this forest is a **survivor**. Laurisilva covered southern Europe millions of years ago and here it never died out.
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El silbo, and why it was born on this island
El silbo gomero is a whistled language that reproduces speech and is recognised by Unesco as Intangible Cultural Heritage. It is not a signal code or folklore invented for visitors: it is a piece of acoustic engineering solving a very specific geographical problem.
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One kilometre in a straight line, three hours on foot
This is the planning mistake made most often on this island, and it has nothing to do with getting lost. La Gomera is split by very deep radial ravines, and that breaks any estimate based on map distance, including a satnav’s.
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The ferry to La Gomera: what is worth knowing
La Gomera is almost always visited from Tenerife, because the crossing is short and there is a ferry from the south of the island. It is a simple hop with two warnings that save a bad day: seasickness is real in that channel, and a single-day trip delivers less than it promises.
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La Gomera’s beaches, and why the sea is in charge
La Gomera is not an island of broad pale-sand beaches: its beaches are black sand or cobble, wedged at the mouths of ravines and open to the Atlantic. They are magnificent and they ask for a different attitude to the sea, because most have no bay to shelter them.
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El Hierro guides (5)
The Mar de las Calmas, and why the water is like that
The Mar de las Calmas is the south-western coastal strip of El Hierro, and its name says it: sheltered water. Combined with what lies beneath, it produces some of the best diving conditions in the Atlantic, and not by chance: three geographical factors add up.
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El Hierro, the island that moved in 2011
In 2011 El Hierro recorded thousands of earthquakes and a submarine eruption south of La Restinga. It was the first eruptive episode in the Canaries in forty years and it left two things: a lesson in volcanic monitoring, and an island that remains, geologically, the youngest in the archipelago.
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The bent junipers, and what they say about the wind
El Sabinar in El Hierro is one of the most recognisable images in the Canaries: twisted trees lying almost parallel to the ground, trunks turned in on themselves. They are not diseased and nothing happened to them. This is the shape a tree takes after centuries of growing against the wind.
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Reaching El Hierro, and why it is not a stopover
El Hierro is the least accessible island in the archipelago, and that is part of what preserves it. There are no direct flights from Europe: you come from Tenerife or Gran Canaria, by plane or by boat. Planning it badly is the mistake that turns a good trip into two days of transport.
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The zero meridian and a plant that pumps water with wind
El Hierro has two claims that sound like brochure copy and are true: it was the world’s zero meridian for centuries, and today it is an island aiming to run on renewable energy. Both come from the same thing: being the westernmost point, and being small and mountainous.
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La Graciosa guides (5)
The eighth island, and what recognition changed
For decades people were taught that the Canaries had seven islands. Since 2018 there are eight: La Graciosa was officially recognised as an island of the archipelago. It is not a geographical change — it was always there — but an administrative one, and it explains a good deal about how the place works.
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The Órzola ferry, and why that strait is rough
La Graciosa is reached by ferry from Órzola, at the northern tip of Lanzarote. The crossing is short — over the El Río strait — and it is one of those that most surprises anyone who assumes short means calm. That channel has a reputation, and it has earned it.
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No cars: on foot, by bicycle or in an authorised 4x4
La Graciosa has no surfaced roads and you cannot bring your own car. That is not an inconvenience to work around: it is how the island functions, and it entirely determines how you organise the day and what you can see.
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The Chinijo, and what being inside a reserve means
La Graciosa is not alone: it is part of the Chinijo Archipelago, along with Alegranza, Montaña Clara and two rock islets, plus the Risco de Famara on Lanzarote. It is the largest marine reserve in Europe, and that has practical consequences for anyone who gets in the water.
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Staying the night, and how it changes the island
Most people visit La Graciosa for the day and return to Lanzarote on the last boat. Staying overnight is a different experience — the island empties when the ferry leaves — but it comes with conditions worth knowing in advance, because accommodation here does not work like a normal destination.
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