10 Best Things to Do in Gran Canaria

Roque Nublo stands 80 metres tall on a plateau 1,813 metres above sea level, and it is the image most visitors carry away from Gran Canaria. Geologists date the eruption that formed Roque Nublo to around 4.5 million years ago, and the volcanic cycle named after the rock built much of the island's interior.

The walk from the La Goleta car park on the GC-600 takes 30 to 40 minutes each way and climbs about 150 metres on a stony path. It is not technical, though the last stretch is exposed and windy. On clear winter mornings Mount Teide on Tenerife rises across the water. Access and parking are free, and the car park fills by 10am at weekends.

Pro Tip: Drive up before 9am or after 4pm. Cloud banks against the plateau through the middle of the day, and at sunset the rock turns copper once the coach groups have gone.

Las Palmas de Gran Canaria was founded in 1478, and Vegueta is where that story began. The quarter's cobbled grid holds the Catedral de Santa Ana, where a lift carries you up a tower for a rooftop view across terracotta roofs, and the Casa de Colon, a museum in the old governor's house where Christopher Columbus is said to have stayed in 1492.

Plaza de Santa Ana is the civic heart, guarded by eight bronze dogs. Two streets away the Mercado de Vegueta sells island cheeses and papayas from 7am. Cathedral entry costs around 5 EUR, the Casa de Colon about 4 EUR and the Museo Canario roughly 6 EUR. Thursday evening brings the Vegueta tapas run, when bars along Calle Mendizabal serve a small plate and a drink for a few euros.

Pro Tip: Park at the San Telmo underground car park and walk south into the quarter. Street parking in Vegueta is metered, scarce and enforced hard on weekday mornings.

Playa de las Canteras runs three kilometres along the northern edge of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, and a volcanic reef called La Barra lies offshore, flattening the Atlantic swell across most of its length. That reef is why families swim here in water that behaves like a lagoon while surfers work the exposed La Cicer end near the Auditorio Alfredo Kraus.

The promenade behind the sand is lined with fish restaurants, where grilled vieja with papas arrugadas runs about 14 to 18 EUR. Sunbed and parasol hire costs roughly 10 EUR a day. Snorkelling over La Barra at low tide turns up sea bream and octopus in under two metres of water. The beach itself is free and lifeguarded year round.

Pro Tip: Check the tide table before you swim. At high tide the reef submerges and the swell rolls straight in, while two hours either side of low tide gives the calmest and clearest water.

Puerto de Mogan was a fishing village before the low white apartments and footbridges went up over its saltwater canals in the 1980s. What remains is walkable and low-rise, with bougainvillea spilling over the lanes and a working marina at the centre. Fishing boats still land at the old quay each morning, and the catch is sold beside the yachts.

The Friday market fills the harbour front from about 9am to 2pm and is the busiest morning of the week by a wide margin. A small sheltered beach sits east of the marina. Glass-bottom ferries link Puerto de Mogan with Puerto Rico and Arguineguin for roughly 12 to 20 EUR return, which is the best way to see the cliffs of this coast from the water.

Pro Tip: Come on a Thursday or Saturday if you want the lanes to yourself. Friday's market draws coaches from every southern resort and the parking areas are full by 10am.

Tejeda sits at 1,050 metres inside the eroded basin islanders call the Caldera de Tejeda, and Miguel de Unamuno famously described the landscape around it as a petrified storm. Whitewashed houses with terracotta roofs step down the slope, and almond terraces fill the ground below them. Those trees flower through late January and February.

The village is known across Gran Canaria for almond sweets, and bakeries on Calle Doctor Hernandez Guerra sell bienmesabe and mazapan by weight for a few euros. There is a small museum of medicinal plants and an ethnographic museum, each under 3 EUR. From the viewpoint at the top of the village you look straight across at Roque Bentayga and Roque Nublo.

Pro Tip: Time a visit for the almond blossom festival in early February, when the terraces turn white and pink. The GC-15 climb from Vega de San Mateo is a slow road with tight switchbacks, so allow a full hour from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.

Pico de las Nieves reaches 1,949 metres, the highest point on Gran Canaria, and on a clear day the view takes in the whole central caldera, Roque Nublo below and the cone of Mount Teide about 130 kilometres away on Tenerife. A paved road runs almost to the top, so this viewpoint asks for no walking at all.

Temperatures up here typically sit ten degrees below the coast, and winter nights drop below freezing with occasional snow, which is where the name comes from. Part of the summit is a military installation and closed to the public, so follow signs to the public mirador. Canary pine forest spreads northwest below the rim. There is no entry fee and no cafe.

Pro Tip: Bring a fleece even in August. Wind chill at 1,949 metres regularly makes it feel ten to fifteen degrees colder than Maspalomas, and most visitors arrive in beach clothes and leave within five minutes.

The Barranco de Guayadeque cuts seven kilometres inland from Aguimes, and people have lived in caves carved into its walls since before the Castilian conquest. Some of those caves are still occupied today. Others have become restaurants, a chapel dug into the rock at Cuevas Bermejas, and an interpretation centre built into the hillside that explains the ravine's aboriginal burial sites.

The valley is one of the richest botanical pockets in the Canary Islands, holding endemic plants that grow nowhere else on earth. A single road runs up the ravine and ends at a cluster of cave restaurants serving goat stew and gofio escaldado for around 12 to 16 EUR. The interpretation centre charges under 5 EUR. Marked walking routes climb from the roadhead into the upper valley.

Pro Tip: Book a cave restaurant table for Sunday lunch a week ahead. Canarian families fill Guayadeque at weekends, and the road up is single-track in places, so arriving after 1pm means reversing for oncoming cars.

Playa de Amadores is an engineered beach, a curved bay of imported pale sand held between two breakwaters and opened in the 1990s just west of Puerto Rico. The water inside those arms barely moves. That makes it the most forgiving swimming spot on the whole south coast for small children and nervous swimmers.

A promenade of low-key bars and ice cream places curves behind the sand, and a walkway climbs the headland to a viewpoint over the cliffs. Sunbeds cost about 6 EUR each and go quickly in high season. Paid parking above the beach runs roughly 1 EUR an hour. The bay faces southwest, so it keeps afternoon sun longer than the beaches at Puerto Rico.

Pro Tip: Walk the coastal path from Puerto Rico rather than driving. It takes 25 minutes, runs above the sea the whole way, and saves you circling the Amadores car park between 11am and 3pm.

The Caldera de Bandama is a near-perfect volcanic crater roughly a kilometre wide and 200 metres deep, formed about 2,000 years ago, which counts as recent in the geology of Gran Canaria. It is the closest serious landscape to Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, and that proximity makes it the easiest half-day trip on this list.

There are two ways to see it. Drive to the Pico de Bandama at 569 metres for a viewpoint taking in the crater, the capital, the airport and the mountains inland. Or take the path from the Bandama golf course down to the crater floor, a descent of about 45 minutes each way past a vineyard and an abandoned farmstead. Both cost nothing.

Pro Tip: Do the crater floor walk in the morning and carry water. The path is fully exposed, the climb back out is steeper than it looks on the way down, and there is nothing to drink between the rim and the bottom.