The Most Beautiful Gardens, Parks and Forests in the Canary Islands
8 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful gardens, parks and forests in the Canary Islands are Maspalomas Dunes, Icod Dragon Tree and Jardín de Cactus. The list covers 8 gardens, parks and forests. Last updated 14 October 2026.
The Canary Islands are young volcanic peaks rising from the Atlantic off Africa, and their living landscapes grow from that unusual mix of lava, ocean and steady trade winds. Moist air piles against the northern slopes and feeds dense cloud forest, while the southern coasts and the eastern islands stay almost desert-dry. Isolation has produced plants found nowhere else, and on the barest islands people learned to garden in the volcanic ash itself.
On La Gomera, Garajonay National Park protects one of the finest surviving laurel forests, its mossy trees wrapped in drifting mist. On Tenerife, Teide National Park surrounds Spain's highest mountain with a high caldera of lava fields where the red spires of the Teide bugloss bloom in early summer. In Icod de los Vinos, the Icod Dragon Tree is the largest and oldest known specimen of the Canary dragon tree, its crown spreading from a massive trunk.
On the south coast of Gran Canaria, the Maspalomas Dunes form a protected field of shifting sand between the resorts and the sea. Lanzarote adds two creations of the human hand. The Jardín de Cactus, designed by César Manrique in a former quarry, lays out cacti from around the world in stepped terraces of black stone. In La Geria, vines grow in hollows dug into the volcanic ash and sheltered by low semicircular walls.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Maspalomas Dunes | Nature reserve | |
| 2 | Icod Dragon Tree | Remarkable tree | |
| 3 | Jardín de Cactus | Botanical garden | |
| 4 | Teide National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 5 | Garajonay National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 6 | Caldera de Taburiente National Park | National park | |
| 7 | Timanfaya National Park | National park | |
| 8 | La Geria | Vineyard landscape |
01 Maspalomas Dunes
Dunas de Maspalomas
Spain27.743° N 15.583° W
Image by hikersbay from Pixabay The reserve is more than sand. On its western edge lies La Charca, a brackish coastal lagoon where stilts, little ringed plovers, coots and moorhens nest and migrants such as little egrets, grey herons, whimbrels and even flamingos stop on their way between Europe and Africa. Beside it grows a palm grove of native Canary Island palms, where the Gran Canaria giant lizard is common.
Did you know? Beach kiosks along Playa del Inglés once blocked the wind that carries sand inland, and their number has been cut back since 1995 to help the dunes.
02 Icod Dragon Tree
Spain28.367° N 16.722° W
H. Zell · CC BY-SA 3.0 The "thousand years" should be taken loosely. Dragon trees have no annual rings, and estimates of this tree's age have ranged absurdly, from a 1907 Swiss study that proposed 2,500 years to a 1975 assessment that allowed only about 350. More recent thinking puts it somewhere around 800 to 1,000 years, which would still make it a venerable tree by any standard.
Did you know? In 1993 the road that ran past the tree was moved away to protect it, and the garden around it opened in 1996.
03 Jardín de Cactus
Jardín de Cactus de Lanzarote
Spain · 13.7 km from Arrecife29.080° N 13.476° W
Image by neufal54 from Pixabay Manrique designed the garden as an amphitheatre. Terraces of dark volcanic stone step down into the old pit, and on them grow some 4,500 plants of about 450 species of cacti and other succulents, gathered from the deserts of the Americas, Madagascar and other dry regions of the world.
Did you know? Many of the plants came from the collection of a cactus grower from the nearby village of Haría, and the botanist Estanislao González Ferrer chose the species.
04 Teide National Park
Parque Nacional del Teide
Spain28.276° N 16.643° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Barni1 from Pixabay Most visitors come for the landscape, which looks unlike anything else in Europe. Lava flows of different ages lie across the caldera floor in black, brown and rust; the plain of Ucanca stretches flat and pale beneath the peak; the eroded rock towers of the Roques de García stand like sculptures beside the road; the pumice fields of Minas de San José look lunar.
05 Garajonay National Park
Parque nacional de Garajonay
Spain28.126° N 17.237° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by nike159 from Pixabay The forest changes character with its exposure. In the sheltered, north-facing valleys it is at its richest, a true subtropical rainforest with the tallest laurels; on the slopes it thins, and on the drier southern side it gives way to a lower forest of heather adapted to less humid air.
06 Caldera de Taburiente National Park
Parque nacional de la Caldera de Taburiente
Spain28.754° N 17.885° W
Luc Viatour · CC BY-SA 3.0 Despite its name, the caldera was not created by a single volcanic explosion. Over several million years, a series of overlapping shield volcanoes built up a mountain in the north of La Palma some 3,000 metres high. Around half a million years ago its south-western flank gave way and slid towards the ocean in a gigantic landslide, and running water has been widening and deepening the resulting hollow ever since.
Did you know? In 2022 the caldera was named one of the first 100 IUGS geological heritage sites.
07 Timanfaya National Park
Parque Nacional de Timanfaya
Spain · 24.1 km from Arrecife29.014° N 13.780° W
Image by neufal54 from Pixabay Much of what is known about the first months comes from the parish priest of Yaiza, Andrés Lorenzo Curbelo, whose account describes a mountain rising out of the earth in a single night and rivers of fire running down to the sea, while the inhabitants fled and returned and fled again. Today the area is still called the Montañas del Fuego, the Fire Mountains, and the name is not just poetry.
Did you know? Underground temperatures at the Islote de Hilario are high enough to turn poured water instantly into steam.
08 La Geria
Spain · 15.9 km from Arrecife28.974° N 13.701° W
No machine-readable author provided. Yummifruitbat assumed (based on copyright claims). · CC BY-SA 2.5 Each pit, or hoyo, can be one to two metres deep, and on the windward side most are guarded by a low crescent of dry-stone wall, a zoco, stacked from lava blocks to break the steady trade wind. The volcanic cinders do the rest. They are porous enough to soak up dew and night humidity and hold it against the roots, which allows vines to grow on an island that receives almost no rain.
Did you know? The method proved so effective that lapilli is quarried here and spread as a mulch about 10 cm deep on unburied fields elsewhere, a technique called enarenado artificial.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful gardens, parks and forests in the Canary Islands?
- On our list, Maspalomas Dunes ranks first, followed by Icod Dragon Tree and Jardín de Cactus.
- What is laurisilva?
- Laurisilva is a humid evergreen laurel forest, a relic of the subtropical forests that covered much of southern Europe and North Africa millions of years ago. It survives today mainly on the Atlantic islands of Macaronesia, where trade-wind clouds keep it moist; Garajonay on La Gomera is one of its best examples.
- Why are the vines of La Geria planted in pits?
- Eruptions in the 1730s buried this part of Lanzarote under volcanic ash. Farmers dig down through the ash to reach the old soil, and the porous ash layer holds moisture from the night air while the curved stone walls protect each vine from the wind.
- What is a dragon tree?
- The Canary dragon tree, Dracaena draco, is a slow-growing tree native to the Canary Islands and nearby Atlantic islands and coasts. Its trunk branches into a dense umbrella crown, and its red resin was long known as dragon's blood.
- How many gardens, parks and forests are on this list in the Canary Islands?
- The list covers 8 gardens, parks and forests.