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Moving to Spain’s Canary Islands: The pros and cons

The Atlantic archipelago is a paradise with arguably the best climate in Europe, but there are many practical considerations foreigners should factor in before moving there. The Local Spain’s editor Alex Dunham, who grew up in Tenerife, explains.

Published: 12 April 2022 12:56 CEST
Updated: 14 September 2023 15:33 CEST

Moving to Spain's Canary Islands: The pros and cons

There’s a big difference in population between the islands. The order, from most populated to least is Tenerife (928,604 residents), Gran Canaria (855,521), Lanzarote (155,080 - pictured in the photo), Fuerteventura (119,732), La Palma (83,458), La Gomera, (21,678), El Hierro (11,147) and La Graciosa (732). Photo: Daniil Sliusar/Unsplash

The Canaries have the best weather in Spain, but it isn’t always perfect

The islands’ location off the coast of Western Sahara, together with the trade winds (alisios) that constantly breeze through the archipelago, ensure that for the most part it’s never too hot and never too cold.

From September to July you can expect it to be between 18 and 28 C, remaining warmer than other coastal locations in southern and eastern mainland Spain in winter.

It’s no wonder that the Canaries are known as the land of eternal spring, but those who enjoy a change of seasons (and wardrobe) may find it ‘too’ perfect.

It’s also worth noting that the more mountainous islands tend to have microclimates, meaning that you aren’t guaranteed warm weather in places of high altitude.

And the biggest meteorological drawback of the Canary Islands is that calima – sand from the nearby Sahara desert – is blown over several times a year, turning the sky yellow, making it harder to breathe and covering everything in dust.

With sun almost all year round and arguably the best beaches of all the Canaries, Fuerteventura is perfect for sun seekers, but it’s also very exposed to calima. Photo: Michal Mrozek/Unsplash

You get huge discounts on flights and the islands are well connected

For some Spaniards and foreigners who settle in the Canary Islands, one of their main complaints is that after a while they get the sense of being cut off from the rest of Spain and Europe.

This Canary cabin fever is somewhat justified, as it takes two and half hours to fly to Madrid, three hours to Barcelona, and more than a day by ferry to southern Spain. Unfortunately, spontaneous road trips to another European country aren’t possible.

If there is a silver lining to draw it would be that most Canary residents get a discount of up to 70 percent on flights, making it possible to travel to and from mainland Spain for cheap prices.

There are also a surprisingly high number of direct flights from the main islands of Tenerife and Gran Canary to many countries in Europe, a couple of direct flights to Africa and a new route to New York.

Tourists check the arrival and departure boards at the Reina Sofia Tenerife-South airport. Photo: Desirée Martín/AFP

Overpopulation has its knock-on effects

Despite the small size of the eight Canary islands (with a surface area of less than 7,500 km2), they have a population of more than 2.2 million inhabitants.

That means that the region is the most densely populated in Spain, but this is really only the case in Gran Canaria and Tenerife, which are home to more than 90 percent of the archipelago’s population.

This overpopulation on the two main islands has had other unintended consequences of keeping rent as well as land and property prices higher on average due in part to the lack of space, even though wages and living costs in the Canaries are lower than in many parts of the mainland.

Another knock-on effect is the sheer number of vehicles on the islands. If the Canary Islands were a country, they would be the sixth in the world in terms of most cars per capita.

Las Palmas de Gran Canaria is by far the most populous city in the Canary Islands with 378,000 inhabitants. Photo: Vidar Nordli-Mathisen/Unsplash

It’s not all tourism

Many abroad believe the Canary Islands are one big holiday resort where British breakfasts and German socks in sandals reign supreme.

Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it), this image has been perpetuated by visitors who haven’t ventured much further than their hotels or closest beach.

The reality is that tourism in the Canaries remains centred around a handful of holiday hotspots where everything is focused on accommodating foreign visitors, but the majority of cities, towns and villages across the islands are Spanish in appearance and culture and inhabited mainly by canarios.

There are beautiful colonial towns such as La Laguna in Tenerife, Teror in Gran Canaria and Santa Cruz de la Palma that have hardly changed over five centuries and offer a real experience of true, historic Spain.

Centuries-old Canary balconies in Santa Cruz de La Palma. Photo: Flo/Unsplash

Online shopping is a nightmare

The Canaries’ 1,700km distance from mainland Spain, along with the fact that they have their own specific sales tax (IGIC instead of IVA/VAT), means that many businesses in Europe don’t bother to deliver their goods to the archipelago.

Any attempted purchase on Amazon for example is likely to be met with a “no enviamos a Canarias” (we don’t send to the Canary Islands). There are some companies now specialising in making online shopping easier for isleños, but delivery times are longer and fees are higher.

The Canaries have historically been a key trading stopover point between Africa, the Americas and Europe, and to this day their ports are well supplied and you will be able to find most of what you want in the shops. But if you’re looking to purchase something very specific, you may run into some problems.

The port of Santa Cruz de Tenerife is the most important in the archipelago together with Las Palmas de Gran Canaria’s. Photo: cocoparisienne/Pixabay

Work for foreigners is mostly limited to tourism and teaching

The islands’ economy relies heavily on tourism and Santa Cruz de Tenerife and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria are not exactly Madrid and Barcelona in terms of varied work opportunities.

Foreigners looking to work for a local business may find their greatest chances of landing a job are with something relating to language teaching or tourism as this is where they have the upper hand.

There’s the same lack of entrepreneurial spirit on the islands as in many parts of Spain, not least because bureaucracy and official matters are complex and slow, so standing out with a bright idea is possible for anyone who’s business savvy and patient.

What does seem to be booming is the community of digital nomads and remote workers on the islands, with authorities keen to promote the quality of life of the archipelago for anyone wanting to work remotely.

Tourists walk past a souvenir shop in Los Cristianos in Tenerife. (Photo by Desirée Martín/AFP)

Canarios are friendly but insular-minded

Spaniards from the mainland will be the first to tell you how amiable canarios are and how they love their soft accent in Spanish, closer to how Cubans or Venezuelans sound.

They may also point out that canarios are aplatanados (lazy or bone idle) as they definitely take life more in their stride than people from northern Spain.

What’s certainly true is that despite the many nationalities that visit the archipelago, canarios don’t generally mingle with foreigners (nor are all foreigners interested in mingling with canarios either) .

Their foreign language skills aren’t great and they tend to stick to their own traditions and people, many seeming content to live in their familiar little paradise rather than taking an interest in the outside world. Most of those with big aspirations tend to leave.

Santa Cruz de Tenerife’s carnival is the biggest in Spain and a great place to mingle with ‘canarios’. Photo: Desirée Martín/AFP

If I had to describe life in the Canaries in one word…

It would be mellow.

A move to the Canary Islands will not necessarily provide you with career opportunities or the entertainment and hustle and bustle of Spain’s big cities, but it is a benign place with plenty on offer for a happy life.

The Canaries has one of the best climates in the world for a life best enjoyed outdoors, incredible and very varied nature, a lower cost of living overall, more history and culture than most outsiders imagine, easy-going locals, and despite their far-flung location, great links to Europe.

The laurisilva forests of the greener Canary islands are the perfect place to avoid the crowds and popular tourist spots. Photo: Mihaly Koles/Unsplash

Member comments

Anonymous - 8 September 2022 at 17:16 CEST

Yes, businesses on Amazon Spain often won’t send items to the Canaries. I experienced this as I live on Tenerife. The way to get round it is to order from Amazon Germany where they have no problem sending goods here. Quite a few of the things I’ve ordered from Amazon Germany actually are despatched from Spain.

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Good tourist, bad tourist: How to travel responsibly in Spain

Barcelona resident David Mar doesn’t travel, but he thinks about tourism every day.

Tourists crowd the buses — essential for movement in a hilly neighbourhood like his. They leave trash for residents to discover in the morning. They shout and sing at night and wander drunkenly through the residential streets, ambling into backyards and pulling down laundry on clotheslines.

“It’s a disturbance that goes from when you wake up in the morning until you go to bed at night,” he told The Local Spain. “You don’t feel welcome in your own neighbourhood.”

Mar lives in Turó de la Rovira, on a 262-metre hill that towers over the city.

A viewpoint atop the hill called Los Bunkers de Carmel has gone viral on TikTok for its sweeping city views, bringing hordes of tourists to come drink wine, watch the sunset, and sometimes party into the early morning.

But for the residents of the surrounding Carmel neighbourhood — among Barcelona’s poorest — the consequences of this tourist explosion have been severe.

Mar was involved in a physical altercation with a group of four Australians, after he confronted them for tipping over parked motorcycles.

And last June a 76 year-old man was assaulted by a group of seven English-speaking youths after he tried to stop them from jumping a fence that had been put up around the Bunkers.

Such events are commonplace in Carmel, Mar says, with the post-pandemic massification of tourism provoking an unstoppable flow of Instagram-like-hungry travellers, fuelled by an increasingly lucrative industry whose interests often conflict with those of local residents.

“It collides directly with the most basic rights of those who live here,” Mar says. “Our right to housing, our right to transportation, our right to rest peacefully.”

With some 1.3 billion international arrivals globally in 2023, more people are travelling for pleasure than ever before in human history.

But as excessive crowds stress infrastructure and locals find themselves pushed out of their own communities, prevailing attitudes towards travel must be reconsidered if global tourism is to continue growing sustainably.

“Tourism isn’t a right, it’s a decision that you make,” Mar says. “And if you do it, you must be aware of the consequences it can generate.”

A couple uses a selfie stick to take a picture next to a banner warning tourists on drought alert in Catalonia, near Sagrada Familia basilica in Barcelona. (Photo by PAU BARRENA / AFP)

Empathy abroad

Bartolomé Deyá Tortella, a researcher and the Dean of Tourism Faculty at the University of the Balearic Islands, says few tourists consider such consequences.

Instead, they embrace their inner hedonist and focus their vacation time on maximum pleasure for minimum price. This mindset might cause a tourist to forget their values and do things they’d never do at home.

“We all become capitalists when we practice tourism,” Deyá told The Local. “You think, ‘I paid for this, I’m on vacation, I’m having my moment of pleasure, I worked the whole year for it.”

Such thinking could explain why someone might respect quiet hours in their own neighbourhoods, but shout drunkenly in the streets late at night while on vacation.

Or why on a trip to Mallorca, where Deyá lives and works, a tourist might feel compelled to take a 10-minute shower — despite the water-stressed Mediterranean island’s near-drought conditions — while residents routinely shower in a minute or less.

Failure to consider saving water or respecting quiet hours comes down to lack of empathy, Deyá says, and our tendency to other the people whose communities we enter while traveling.

“Act as if you were in your own home,” he says. “If when you’re in your own city you don’t shout in the street because you know your neighbours are sleeping, why do it when you’re traveling?”

Social sustainability

Much has been said about environmental sustainability, but it’s easy to forget the social impacts of travel; how our interactions with local people and economies can change that society.

“When every one of us travels, it implies that the places where we came from are transformed, the places we pass through are transformed, and obviously, so are the places we arrive to,” Manuel de la Calle Vaquero, Vicedean of the Faculty of Commerce and Tourism at Complutense University of Madrid, told The Local Spain.

With this in mind, the most sustainable way to travel is by using one’s presence to positively impact the local community.

Or in other words, to leave a place better than you found it.

“When you jump on a plane, it’s important to make sure that trip counts for something positive,” says Justin Francis, founder of Responsible Travel, a holiday company that collaborates with local partners to plan socially and environmentally sustainable vacations.

“I advise people to fly less, keep short trips flight-free – and, when you do fly, stay in a place longer and travel in a way that does as much good as possible,” Francis says.

Anti-gentrification banners addressing were already hanging from balconies in Barcelona back in 2017. (Photo by Josep LAGO / AFP)

Neighbourhood colonisers

One of the most significant ways in which tourism can alter the social landscape is through accommodation.

Not long ago, tourists and residents in Spain did not typically mix, with tourists sticking near their hotels, rarely straying into residential zones, Deyá says.

But today’s tourist has matured, and now expects novelty; an “authentic” experience that they can convince themselves distinguishes them from the thousands of other tourists expecting the same.

Nowadays they live among residents, in apartments instead of hotels, utilizing short-term rental platforms like Airbnb, which has led to the dissolution of boundaries between a city’s tourist and local zones.

Vaquero describes this new kind of tourist as the “anti-tourism” tourist, in the sense that they’re not interested in the sort of tourism promoted by governments and travel agencies, but instead consider themselves the explorers of new “authentic” destinations outside the typical tourist sphere.

“The one who wants to leave the traditional tourist circuit and supposedly goes looking for ‘authentic’ neighbourhoods — that tourist is obviously the coloniser,” Vaquero says.

The boom in short-term vacation rentals has led to what’s been dubbed the “Airbnb effect” in neighbourhoods worldwide, in which residents are slowly replaced by a constant flux of tourists. For landlords, vacation rentals can be far more lucrative than renting to residents, thus incentivizing them to evict long-term tenants in order to list their properties on Airbnb.

This is exactly what happened to Emanuele Dal Carlo. His landlord didn’t want to renew the lease on his small Venice apartment because they could make more renting it out on Airbnb. Like so many other Venetians, Dal Carlo had to move to the mainland.

To better understand the cultural erosion he saw happening to his city as a result of Airbnb, Dal Carlo enlisted the help of researchers to conduct a study, through which he discovered only 2,000 of the 3,300 Airbnbs in the city were registered with the government, and many were rented by foreign hosts with zero connection to Venice.

This means that much of the money tourists spend on accommodation never lands on the ground, thus eliminating any potential benefit to the local economy.

“What’s wrong is that the money available from tourism is not fairly distributed between workers and residents,” Dal Carlo says.

Dal Carlo now runs Fairbnb, an ethical Airbnb alternative which promotes “community-powered tourism.” Hosts are certified local, and the platform fees are put directly towards a social project in the local community, like food redistribution or sustainable energy initiatives.

As a tourist, the best way to avoid feeding the problem is by avoiding short term rentals when possible, Dal Carlo says, and instead booking accommodations with local businesses, like small independent hotels or traditional bed and breakfasts.

And if you absolutely must use Airbnb, Dal Carlo suggests booking with local hosts.

“If you’re traveling to Venice and your host is from Finland, ask yourself some questions,” he says.

An elderly local man on crutches waits to cross as a group of tourists using Segways squeeze by and into the narrow streets of Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter. (Photo by PAU BARRENA / AFP)

Whose fault?

In Spain, anti-tourism protests have crescendoed in recent weeks. The travel industry, it seems, has grown beyond its means, and locals are taking note.

To some degree, the problem can be traced to poor planning on the part of local governments and the unchecked expansion of algorithmic platforms like Airbnb.

Deyá points out that many government entities in Spain have welcomed tourist money, pursuing marketing campaigns without investing in adequate preparation.

“Tourism is the typical sector where many governments say, ‘ok, let’s leave it, because this works. Don’t touch it,’” Deyá says. “But there’s been no planning, there’s been no strategy.”

Back in Barcelona, the city’s public transport authority was involved in the promotion of the Carmel bunkers through its Bus Turistic webpage, encouraging tourists to come see the “spectacular views over Barcelona.”

The promotion was taken down on April 16th after continued anti-tourism protests from the Turó de la Rovira neighbourhood council, of which Mar is a member.

But as is the case with so many industries in a crowded world full of contradictions, the individual cannot be absolved of all responsibility, as one’s choice to participate in harmful systems enables their continuation.

No law or tourist tax will compel tourists to act with empathy, and the absence of such regulations should not be used to justify one’s bad behaviour abroad.

“The problem is that we’re hypocrites, and we think that it’s someone else who has to solve the problem,” Deyá says.

Mar, who’s never been much of a traveller himself, is no longer interested in traveling internationally after seeing what tourism has done to his city.

“So much of my city has become inhospitable for residents,” he says. “Because we’re truly suffering from it here in Barcelona, the concept of tourism disgusts me more and more.”

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