The Canaries sit off the Moroccan coast at a latitude that gives them twenty-odd degrees in January, and they are four to five hours from most of northern Europe. That combination has no real competitor: the Mediterranean is cold in winter, the Caribbean is a long-haul flight, and nowhere else in Europe is reliably warm.
The islands are volcanic, geologically young at the eastern end and older at the western, and the differences between them are large.
The seven, briefly
| Island | Character | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Tenerife | Largest. Teide, Spain's highest mountain, at 3,715 m. Green north, dry south | Variety; the biggest range of everything |
| Gran Canaria | A continent in miniature — dunes, mountains, laurel forest | Walking; a real city in Las Palmas |
| Lanzarote | Volcanic, treeless, extraordinary. Shaped by one artist's vision | Landscape and design; the most distinctive |
| Fuerteventura | Beaches and wind. Flat, dry, empty | Beaches and watersports |
| La Palma | Steep, green, a huge volcanic crater. Dark-sky reserve | Walking and stars |
| La Gomera | Ancient laurel rainforest, deep ravines, whistled language | Walking; the quietest |
| El Hierro | Smallest and remotest | Diving and solitude |
The thing to understand about the weather
The trade winds come from the north-east, which means the north of each island is greener, cloudier and wetter, and the south is drier and sunnier. This is not a small effect: on Tenerife you can drive from cloud and banana plantations to desert in forty minutes.
Package resorts are almost all in the south for exactly this reason. If you want reliable winter sun, book south. If you want landscape, the north is where it is — and the answer for many visitors is to stay south and drive north for the days out.
The calima. Occasionally a hot wind brings Saharan dust across the islands, dropping visibility and coating everything in fine sand for a few days. It is unpredictable, usually short, and worth knowing about so it does not read as a ruined holiday.
Lanzarote deserves a paragraph
Lanzarote is the one people are most often surprised by. It is almost treeless, black and red, and much of what has been built on it since the 1960s follows the work of César Manrique, an artist who persuaded the island to ban high-rise building and roadside advertising and to paint the buildings white with green or blue woodwork.
The result is an island that looks unlike anywhere else in Europe, with a coherence that is entirely deliberate. Timanfaya's lava fields, the Jameos del Agua cave, and the vineyards at La Geria — vines grown in individual pits dug into black ash, each with a stone wall against the wind — are all worth the trip on their own.
Practical points
- Hire a car. The islands are small, the roads are good, and the resorts are not where the interest is.
- Teide needs a permit to climb the final peak, limited and booked well ahead — and since January 2026 non-residents also pay a fee for the summit trail. The cable car to just below the summit needs no permit.
- The sea is cooler than the air. Atlantic, not Mediterranean — swimmable in winter for the hardy, not for everyone.
- Ferries link the islands, and a two-island trip is straightforward. Tenerife–La Gomera is under an hour.
- Christmas and New Year are peak, with prices to match. January and February are the value months and the weather is the same.
The short version
- Europe's only dependable winter sun, four to five hours away.
- North of each island is green and cloudy; south is dry and sunny. Resorts are in the south for a reason.
- Lanzarote for landscape and design, La Gomera or La Palma for walking, Tenerife for range, Fuerteventura for beaches.
- Hire a car. The interest is inland.
- January and February cost far less than Christmas for identical weather.
