Canary Islands

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Canary Islands sit roughly 100 kilometres off the northwest coast of Africa, yet they belong to Spain. That geographic paradox has shaped everything about them. Formed by a volcanic hot spot beneath the Atlantic Ocean, these seven main islands have drawn Phoenicians, Romans, French knights, Dutch war fleets, and British admirals. Today they receive more than 14 million tourists a year, more visitors than the entire population of Belgium arrives to swim, hike, and stare up at Mount Teide, the highest peak in Spain and the third tallest volcano on Earth when measured from its base on the ocean floor. The islands have been called the Fortunate Isles since antiquity. Behind that name lies a story of conquest, slavery, spectacular geology, and a population that for centuries served as a gateway between three continents. Who were the people already living here when the Spanish arrived? Why did the name Canary come from dogs and not birds? And how did a chain of volcanic rocks in the Atlantic end up hosting some of the most important telescopes in the world?

• 2. Fortunate Isles, Ancient Roots

  ›

  Before any human arrived, the Canaries were home to creatures that exist nowhere else on Earth: giant lizards of the species Gallotia goliath, giant rats found only on Tenerife and Gran Canaria, and giant tortoises of the genera Geochelco burchardi and Geochelco vulcanica. Linguistic, genetic, and archaeological evidence places the first human settlers on the islands at least 2,000 years ago, and possibly 3,000. They came from the nearby North African coast, sharing a common origin with the Amazigh peoples, and they likely landed first on the easternmost islands of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura. A 2024 study from the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria found archaeological evidence that Romans were the first outsiders to make contact, during the period from the 1st century BCE to the 1st century CE. These indigenous inhabitants came to be called the Guanches, though that name originally referred only to the people of Tenerife. Their social structure included a system of matrilineal descent in most islands, where inheritance passed through the female line. Society was hierarchical: king, royal relatives, lower nobility, villeins, plebeians, and finally those with the least status of all, including executioners and embalmers. Their religion was animist, centred on the sun, the moon, and natural features such as mountains. At the site of Lomo de los Gatos on Gran Canaria, occupied from roughly 1,600 years ago until the 1960s, archaeologists have uncovered round stone houses, complex burial sites, and objects that reveal a culture of ceramics, fishing, hunting, farming, and cave painting. Thousands of inscriptions in the Libyco-Berber alphabet are scattered across the islands, documented extensively by linguists. King Juba II, the Numidian ruler who served as a protégé of Caesar Augustus, is credited with bringing the islands to the attention of the Western world. According to Pliny the Elder, Juba found the islands uninhabited but discovered a small stone temple and traces of earlier buildings. Juba's naval force used the settlement at Mogador in what is now western Morocco as its base. Pliny also recorded a detail that would echo for millennia: the island of Canaria contained vast multitudes of very large dogs. Those dogs gave the archipelago its name. The canary bird was named after the islands, not the other way around.

• 3. Conquest and Its Cost

  ›

  In 1402, the French explorers Jean de Bethencourt and Gadifer de la Salle landed on Lanzarote as vassals of King Henry III of Castile. What followed was, in the words of scholars, a brutal cultural and military clash lasting over a century. Bethencourt received the title King of the Canary Islands while still acknowledging the Castilian crown as his overlord. The early phase of conquest, known as the Betancurian or Norman conquest, covered Lanzarote, El Hierro, and Fuerteventura between 1402 and 1405. The subsequent Castilian nobles who acquired these islands also brought La Gomera under control around 1450. The final phase, the royal conquest, ran from 1478 to 1496, when the Crown of Castile directly financed the conquest of Gran Canaria, La Palma, and Tenerife. Gran Canaria fell on the 6th of March 1480. Tenerife was finally subdued in 1496 by Alonso Fernandez de Lugo. Some scholars, including Mohamed Adhikari, describe the entire enterprise as a genocide of the Guanches. After conquest came a new economic model built on single-crop cultivation: first sugarcane, then wine. The Spanish Crown needed labour far beyond what the reduced indigenous population could provide, and so enslaved people were brought from North and Sub-Saharan Africa in large numbers. Research on skeletons recovered from the burial site of Finca Clavijo on Gran Canaria revealed that all of the adults buried there undertook extensive physical activity causing significant stress on the spine and appendicular skeleton, consistent with the physical abnormalities found within enslaved groups from sugarcane plantations around the world. The wealth generated by this labour built magnificent palaces and churches. On La Palma, the Church of El Salvador survives as one of the finest examples of 16th-century architecture on the island. In 1448, Maciot de Bethencourt sold the lordship of Lanzarote to Portugal's Prince Henry the Navigator, a transaction accepted by neither the native population nor the Castilians. Pope Nicholas V ruled that the islands fell under Portuguese control, but that ruling sparked a revolt lasting until 1459. The Treaty of Alcacavas in 1479 finally settled the matter, recognising Castilian control of the Canaries while confirming Portuguese possession of the Azores, Madeira, and Cape Verde.

• 4. A Gateway Between Worlds

  ›

  During the Age of Sail, Spanish galleons heading to the Americas would sail south to the Canaries specifically to catch the prevailing northeasterly trade winds. The fleet of the Virginia Company passed through in 1606, bound for what became Fort Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in what is now the United States. The First Fleet also stopped at Tenerife on its way to Botany Bay, the first European settlement in Australia. This position as a crossroads invited extraordinary wealth and, in equal measure, extraordinary violence. The Ottoman Turkish admiral and privateer Kemal Reis arrived in the Canaries in 1501. Murat Reis the Elder captured Lanzarote in 1585. The most dramatic assault came in 1599 during the Dutch Revolt, when a fleet of 74 ships and 12,000 men commanded by Pieter van der Does attacked Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. The city at the time held around 3,500 of Gran Canaria's 8,545 inhabitants. The Dutch seized the Castillo de la Luz guarding the harbour, but the city itself refused to fall. Three hundred Canarian soldiers ambushed a Dutch force in the village of Monte Lentiscal, killing 150 men and forcing the rest to retreat. The Dutch eventually pillaged Maspalomas on the southern coast, San Sebastian on La Gomera, and Santa Cruz on La Palma, but they abandoned the siege of Las Palmas. Their haul from the entire episode: twelve sheep and three calves. In 1618, Barbary pirates from North Africa raided Lanzarote and La Gomera, taking 1,000 captives to be sold into slavery. On the 25th of July 1797, a British fleet under Horatio Nelson attacked Santa Cruz de Tenerife. The British were repulsed, losing almost 400 men. It was during that battle that Nelson lost his right arm.

• 5. Economy and Emigration

  ›

  The sugar economy eventually faced stiff competition from Spain's Caribbean colonies. Low sugar prices in the 19th century brought severe recessions. A new cash crop, cochineal, known locally as cochinilla, reinvigorated the islands' economy. At the beginning of the 20th century, British companies introduced bananas, with firms such as Fyffes controlling exports. Between 1840 and 1890, as many as 40,000 Canary Islanders emigrated to Venezuela alone. Thousands more left for Cuba and Puerto Rico, where the Spanish monarchy believed Canarians would adapt to island life better than mainland immigrants. Some Canarian traditions survive intact in the diaspora: the Mascaras Festival in the town of Hatillo, Puerto Rico is one example. The modern economy rests heavily on tourism. In 2023, the islands received over 16 million visitors. Tenerife alone drew more than 6.4 million of them, followed by Gran Canaria with over 4.2 million. Tourism accounts for roughly 32% of GDP, with construction making up close to 20%. Agriculture produces bananas and tobacco for export, along with tomatoes, potatoes, onions, grapes, and other crops. The islands operate under a special tax regime: instead of Spain's VAT, they collect a local sales tax called IGIC, with a general rate of 7%. They lie within the European Union Customs Union but outside the VAT area. In 2024, a record 46,843 migrants, mostly from Senegal, Mali, and Morocco, arrived in the Canary Islands without authorisation, up from 39,910 in 2023, as the islands continue to serve as a primary entry point into the European Union from Africa.

• 6. Fire Under the Islands

  ›

  Every major island in the Canaries originated from the same volcanic hot spot beneath the Atlantic, and four of them, Lanzarote, Tenerife, La Palma, and El Hierro, have recorded eruptions since European discovery. The Teide volcano on Tenerife stands 3,715 metres high, making it the highest point in Spain. Its base, measured from the ocean floor, ranks it as the third tallest volcano on Earth. Teide National Park, designated in 1954, became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2007. In 2007 it was also declared one of the 12 Treasures of Spain. The park receives over 2.8 million visitors each year. El Hierro, the westernmost island, experienced a submarine eruption in October 2011, about 2 kilometres south of the town of Restinga. It had been preceded by a series of low-magnitude earthquakes that summer, with a northeast-to-southwest linear trend. The eruption produced gases and pumice but no explosive activity. More dramatic was the eruption of Cumbre Vieja on La Palma, which began on the 19th of September 2021. Cumbre Vieja is a volcanic ridge running along the island's southern flank, and its 2021 eruption was the most recent in the entire island chain. The whole island of La Palma is itself designated a biosphere reserve, and its highest peak, Roque de los Muchachos at 2,423 metres, hosts one of the two professional astronomical observatories on the archipelago: the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory. The other, the Teide Observatory, sits on Tenerife. Both exist because the islands' high mountains rise above the temperature inversion layer, giving astronomers access to exceptionally clear skies. The Grantecan telescope, one of the world's leading instruments, operates from the Roque de los Muchachos peak.

• 7. Two Capitals, One Archipelago

  ›

  The Canary Islands are the only autonomous community in Spain with two official capitals: Santa Cruz de Tenerife and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. That arrangement was formalised in 1927 by decree, when the original single Province of Canary Islands was split into two provinces. The rivalry between the two cities stretches back centuries. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria has been the largest city in the Canaries since 1768, except for a brief period in the 1910s. The shift of political power between the two cities reflected which island was more powerful at any given moment. In May 1661, Captain General Jerónimo de Benavente y Quinones moved the headquarters of the General Captaincy from Gran Canaria to San Cristóbal de La Laguna on Tenerife, because Tenerife was by then the most populated, productive, and economically significant island. La Laguna served as de facto capital of the archipelago for more than six decades until 1723, when Captain General Lorenzo Fernandez de Villavicencio moved the headquarters again, this time to Santa Cruz de Tenerife. That decision persisted through the creation of the formal Province of Canary Islands in November 1833. With the Statute of Autonomy of 1982 and the establishment of the Autonomous Community of the Canary Islands, the dual-capital arrangement was fixed into law. San Cristóbal de La Laguna is itself a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is home to the University of La Laguna, the oldest university in the Canary Islands. As of October 2025, the total population of the archipelago stood at 2,268,035, with around 43% concentrated on Tenerife and 39% on Gran Canaria. In a 2012 survey by the Centro de Investigaciones Sociologicas, 53.8% of respondents described themselves as Spanish and Canarian in equal measure, while 24% said they considered themselves more Canarian than Spanish.