All eight Canary Islands. Beyond the south-Tenerife resort strip — the volcanic interiors, the fishing villages, the islands most package tours never reach.
Lanzarote is famous for its massive British package holiday resorts, but its true history is defined by violent pirate raids and volcanic survival. This guide uncovers how a 1970 runway extension turned a desperate frontier into Europe’s ultimate tourist machine.
Lanzarote’s 1730 volcanic eruptions buried a quarter of the island in lava. Discover how to skip the manufactured tourist traps and hike into blasted craters, explore subterranean magma tubes, and witness the island’s brutal Martian landscape.
How one visionary artist used political leverage in the 1960s to ban high-rise resorts, mandate whitewashed villages, and turn the volcanic island of Lanzarote into a massive, strictly controlled architectural art project.
Gáldar is the buried ancient capital of the Canarii people in northern Gran Canaria, hiding a violent 15th-century past, elite high priestesses, and an astronomical cave.
Tenerife’s northern coast is defined by extreme geography and strange history. From the spiteful 16th-century gardens of La Orotava to the dizzying volcanic drops at El Sauzal, here are four stops that prove the north is an unforgiving escape from the package holiday sunbeds.
To find the real Tenerife, you have to completely abandon the southern mega-resorts. Driving the extreme north reveals a 20-million-year-old rainforest, isolated cliffside villages, and a raw volcanic coastline.
Most tourists never leave the southern beaches, but Tenerife’s ignored East Coast holds the island’s genuine timeline. From a freezing UNESCO city that became the blueprint for Havana to a bizarre abandoned leper colony in the desert, this is the history they’re missing.
Far more than just an industrial port, Santa Cruz is a vibrant, living capital. This guide explores the deep naval history, pristine tropical parks, brutalist architecture, and golden beaches that 7 million tourists skip every year.
Around seventy percent of Tenerife’s visitors never leave the southern resorts. I drove the north-west coast instead: an accidental stop in San Juan de la Rambla, the street-sledging tradition of Icod de los Vinos, Garachico buried by lava in 1706, the seven-million-year-old Teno massif, and a one-euro bus to the restricted lighthouse at Punta de Teno.
El Hierro is the quietest of the main Canary Islands, swapping crowded beach resorts for extreme volcanic isolation, high-altitude pine forests, and terrifying mountain dirt tracks. Discover what it is actually like to explore the literal edge of the map.
La Palma trades all-inclusive resorts and white sand beaches for fresh volcanic wreckage, second-gear hairpin turns, and sea-cave villages. Here is what to expect from the most aggressive, vertically extreme island in the Canaries.
Hermigua is La Gomera’s quietest valley: cliffs on every side, a village officially among Spain’s prettiest with nobody in it, concrete cranes left standing in the sea, and a rockfall road to the north coast’s best beach. Worth it if you rent a car, don’t mind the silence, and like knowing why a place looks the way it does.
