Gran Canaria

Why Go

Gran Canaria has the Sahara to thank for its magnificent, rolling dunes and soft, golden bays. Over centuries, the African desert's silky sands have drifted the short distance across the sea to cloak this island's coastline in its distinctive shimmering edges.

At Maspalomas, the beach rises up in a succession of dramatic, ever-shifting dunes creating a landscape straight out of Lawrence of Arabia. Flights to Gran Canaria offer a bird's eye view of this island's wide, sandy bays but, from this distance, the overall impression is of a lush island with deep green valleys, snowy mountains and mile after mile of untouched wilderness.

But it's at the coast where you'll find the wilderness tamed in a series of welcoming, year-round resorts. Of all the islands to go on holiday to in this sunny archipelago, Gran Canaria holidays are perhaps the ones offering the most variety. Yes, some of its resorts have grown with little regard for Grand Designs-style planning and architecture, but what they lack in finesse they more than make up for in good, unashamed fun. And even in the larger resorts, there's that sense that you really are on an island just off the coast of Africa - maybe it's the palm trees, maybe it's the sand dunes, or, very probably, it's the weather!

On your holidays to Gran Canaria you can be assured that you will be given the warmest welcome, and, if the welcome can seem a little too enthusiastic in parts, there are still wonderfully peaceful resorts to escape to, and, in recent years, the style brigade has reached the island, creating a new wave of achingly beautiful hotels and restaurants breathing new life into this well-trodden slice of paradise.