The Most Beautiful Places in the Canary Islands
24 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in the Canary Islands are Teide, Playa de Cofete and Jameos del Agua. The list covers 24 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
The Canary Islands are the tops of volcanoes rising from the Atlantic seabed off north-west Africa, built over millions of years by a hotspot that is still active. Each island sits at a different stage of that life: Lanzarote and Fuerteventura are old and worn low, while Tenerife and La Palma are young, high and steep. Trade winds, cold ocean currents and bare lava give the archipelago landscapes found nowhere else in Europe, from black-sand coves to pine forests above a sea of cloud.
Teide on Tenerife is the highest mountain in Spain, a stratovolcano whose cone rises out of a vast caldera floor of lava and pumice. On La Palma, the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory stands on the rim of the Caldera de Taburiente, above the clouds that keep its skies dark and steady. Gran Canaria contributes Roque Nublo, a basalt monolith left standing as softer rock eroded around it, and the Maspalomas Dunes, a field of golden sand on the island's southern tip.
Lanzarote shows how people learned to live with fresh lava. Cueva de los Verdes is a lava tube that runs for kilometres under the island, La Geria grows vines in pits dug through volcanic ash and shielded by stone walls, and César Manrique turned a quarry into the Jardín de Cactus and a cliff edge into the Mirador del Río. On Tenerife, the Icod Dragon Tree is the most famous specimen of a species that survives almost only on these islands.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Teide | Volcano | |
| 2 | Playa de Cofete | Beach | |
| 3 | Jameos del Agua | Lava tube | |
| 4 | Roque Nublo | Rock formation | |
| 5 | Maspalomas Dunes | Nature reserve | |
| 6 | Caldera de Taburiente National Park | National park | |
| 7 | Acantilados de Los Gigantes | Cliff | |
| 8 | Garajonay National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 9 | Roque de los Muchachos Observatory | Observatory | |
| 10 | Lanzarote | Island | |
| 11 | Cueva de los Verdes | Lava tube | |
| 12 | Auditorio de Tenerife | Opera house | |
| 13 | Icod Dragon Tree | Remarkable tree | |
| 14 | Jardín de Cactus | Botanical garden | |
| 15 | La Gomera | Island | |
| 16 | Teide National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 17 | La Palma | Island | |
| 18 | Charco Verde | Lagoon | |
| 19 | Timanfaya National Park | National park | |
| 20 | Mirador del Río | Scenic viewpoint | |
| 21 | La Geria | Vineyard landscape | |
| 22 | Siam Park | Water park | |
| 23 | Masca Gorge | Canyon | |
| 24 | Montañas del Fuego | Volcano |
01 Teide
Spain28.273° N 16.644° W
Image by javierAlamo from Pixabay Teide, 3,715 m, is the highest point in Spain and the highest summit of any island in the Atlantic. Measured from the ocean floor it stands some 7,500 m tall, making it the third-largest volcanic structure on Earth after Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
Did you know? The endemic Teide bugloss produces pyramids of red flowers up to 3 m tall, blooming in late spring on the caldera floor.
02 Playa de Cofete
Spain28.112° N 14.390° W
dronepicr · CC BY 2.0 Playa de Cofete is the wild side of Fuerteventura. On the far side of the Jandía peninsula, away from the resorts, an immense sweep of golden sand runs for kilometres along the Atlantic with no promenade, no hotels and no town behind it, only the hamlet of Cofete and a few scattered buildings.
Did you know? Villa Winter was built between 1946 and 1954, with a corner tower giving all-round views and basement walls about 1.4 metres thick.
03 Jameos del Agua
Spain · 23.2 km from Arrecife29.157° N 13.432° W
Image by lapping from Pixabay Jameos del Agua is a lava tube that an artist decided to finish. 5 km beneath the seabed, a submarine stretch known as the Tunnel of Atlantis. Where parts of the roof caved in, they left great open pits that islanders call jameos, a word inherited from the pre-Hispanic population of the Canaries.
Did you know? Females of the blind squat lobster carry only two eggs at a time, unusually large ones for this group of crustaceans.
04 Roque Nublo
Spain · 23 km from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria27.971° N 15.613° W
Image by WunschbrunnenEla from Pixabay Roque Nublo is the finger of rock that anchors the skyline of Gran Canaria: an 80-metre monolith standing on a summit plateau at about 1,813 metres, near the geographic centre of the island and among its highest points.
Did you know? Older records give the name as Roque Nugro or Roque Nuro, forms later smoothed into the familiar Nublo.
05 Maspalomas Dunes
Dunas de Maspalomas
Spain27.743° N 15.583° W
Image by hikersbay from Pixabay At the southern tip of Gran Canaria the island suddenly turns into a small Sahara.
Did you know? Researchers found the mobile dunes drifting westward without new ones forming behind them, a sign that the field is slowly running out of sand.
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 The northern half of La Palma is hollowed out by an immense amphitheatre of rock.
Did you know? The name Taburiente comes from the language of the island's original inhabitants and is said to mean a plain or level ground.
07 Acantilados de Los Gigantes
Spain28.297° N 16.856° W
Image by marcelkessler from Pixabay Along the western coast of Tenerife, dark basalt walls drop straight into the Atlantic from heights of roughly 300 to more than 600 metres. The Acantilados de Los Gigantes, the Cliffs of the Giants, are the product of the sea eating into old volcanic rock, at the seaward edge of the Teno massif.
Did you know? Southwest Tenerife hosts a resident population of short-finned pilot whales, estimated by one study at about 636 animals in 2007–2009.
08 Garajonay National Park
Parque nacional de Garajonay
Spain28.126° N 17.237° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by nike159 from Pixabay Garajonay, spread across the high centre of La Gomera in the Canary Islands, protects the finest surviving example of laurisilva — the humid laurel forest that covered much of southern Europe millions of years ago and now survives only on a handful of Atlantic islands.
09 Roque de los Muchachos Observatory
Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos
Spain28.764° N 17.895° W
H. Zell · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Roque de los Muchachos Observatory occupies the summit ridge of La Palma, the north-westernmost of the Canary Islands, at around 2,400 metres above the Atlantic.
Did you know? The project goes back to 1969, when work on a Northern Hemisphere Observatory began, and took some fifteen years of international cooperation.
10 Lanzarote
Spain · 12 km from Arrecife29.035° N 13.635° W
Bybbisch94, Christian Gebhardt · CC BY-SA 4.0 Lanzarote's black-and-red volcanic badlands aren't ancient history — they're the result of an eruption sequence that ran from 1730 to 1736, one of the longest continuously documented volcanic events anywhere in recorded history, and one that buried a third of the island's most fertile land under lava in the process.
Did you know? Each La Geria vine grows in its own ash pit up to 5 m wide and 3 m deep, sheltered by a low stone wall that also gathers dew.
11 Cueva de los Verdes
Spain · 23.3 km from Arrecife29.161° N 13.439° W
Lviatour · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Cueva de los Verdes is a lava tube in the north of Lanzarote, a tunnel left behind when rivers of molten rock from the La Corona volcano flowed towards the sea. As the surface of the flow cooled and hardened into a crust, the lava beneath kept moving and eventually drained away, leaving a hollow passage.
Did you know? In places the tube is stacked in levels, so the visit route climbs and descends between galleries one above another.
12 Auditorio de Tenerife
Spain · 1.5 km from Santa Cruz de Tenerife28.456° N 16.251° W
Wladyslaw , derivative work: Nikopol · CC BY-SA 3.0 Santiago Calatrava's Auditorio de Tenerife rises on the waterfront of Santa Cruz like a breaking wave or a sail caught in the wind.
Did you know? The building appeared on a Spanish postage stamp in 2008 and on a commemorative 5-euro coin in 2011.
13 Icod Dragon Tree
Spain28.367° N 16.722° W
H. Zell · CC BY-SA 3.0 Dragon trees look like something from another geological age. Dracaena draco is native to the Canary Islands, where it has become a living emblem of the archipelago. The most famous individual of the species stands in Icod de los Vinos on the north coast of Tenerife.
Did you know? A ventilation system was fitted inside the hollow trunk in 1985 to stop fungi from rotting the tree from within.
14 Jardín de Cactus
Jardín de Cactus de Lanzarote
Spain · 13.7 km from Arrecife29.080° N 13.476° W
Image by neufal54 from Pixabay The Jardín de Cactus fills a former quarry on the island of Lanzarote with a dense, sculptural landscape of spines, columns, globes and rosettes.
Did you know? Manrique left natural pillars of weathered lava standing in the pit and treated them as sculptures in their own right.
15 La Gomera
Spain28.115° N 17.225° W
Image by guayota from Pixabay La Gomera, one of the smaller Canary Islands, is roughly round and about 22 km across, yet it rises to 1,487 metres at Alto de Garajonay. Its shape has been compared to half an orange split into segments: deep ravines, the barrancos, radiate from the central plateau to the sea, with steep ridges between them.
16 Teide National Park
Parque Nacional del Teide
Spain28.276° N 16.643° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Barni1 from Pixabay Teide National Park covers the high heart of Tenerife: a vast volcanic caldera, Las Cañadas, and the cone of Teide rising out of it to 3,718 metres, the highest point in Spain.
17 La Palma
Spain28.660° N 17.860° W
Image by b_gofron from Pixabay The north-westernmost of the Canary Islands rises out of the Atlantic as a single steep volcanic mass. From the shore the land climbs to 2,426 metres at the Roque de los Muchachos, and the whole volcanic edifice stands almost seven kilometres above the ocean floor.
Did you know? The 2021 eruption on the Cumbre Vieja ridge lasted 85 days, the longest on the island since records began.
18 Charco Verde
Spain · 28.3 km from Arrecife28.977° N 13.828° W
Chrumps · CC BY-SA 4.0 On the western shore of Lanzarote a small lagoon of startling emerald green lies cupped between a dark volcanic crater wall and a beach of black gravel, with the Atlantic breaking only a few dozen metres away.
Did you know? El Golfo is a geosite of the Lanzarote and Chinijo Islands UNESCO Global Geopark, chosen as an example of hydrovolcanism, where magma and water interact.
19 Timanfaya National Park
Parque Nacional de Timanfaya
Spain · 24.1 km from Arrecife29.014° N 13.780° W
Image by neufal54 from Pixabay On the night of 1 September 1730 the ground opened in the south-west of Lanzarote, and it did not settle again for almost six years.
Did you know? The park covers about 51 square kilometres and was declared in 1974.
20 Mirador del Río
Spain · 27.8 km from Arrecife29.214° N 13.481° W
Image by lapping from Pixabay Mirador del Río is a viewpoint at the northern tip of Lanzarote that is almost invisible until you are inside it.
Did you know? A circular oculus window inside is aimed deliberately at La Corona, the volcano that rises behind the viewpoint.
21 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 La Geria is a vineyard that should not exist. In the 1730s a long series of eruptions from the Timanfaya fissures, lasting from 1730 to 1736, buried much of the farmland of central and southwestern Lanzarote under lava and a thick blanket of black volcanic grit, the lapilli the islanders call picón or rofe.
Did you know? The coarse cinder blanket lets scarce rain drain quickly to the roots, while its poor capillarity and low heat conduction slow evaporation from the soil below.
22 Siam Park
Spain28.072° N 16.727° W
Mataparda · Public domain Siam Park is a water park in Costa Adeje, in the south of Tenerife, built around a Thai theme. It belongs to the Loro Parque group run by the Kiessling family, and was designed by Christoph Kiessling.
Did you know? The wave machine of the Wave Palace was built by Murphys Waves, a specialist company based in Scotland.
23 Masca Gorge
Barranco de Masca
Spain28.295° N 16.851° W
Image by Thunderstorm from Pixabay From a cluster of houses perched on a ridge among palms, a narrow cleft drops through dark volcanic rock all the way to the Atlantic: Masca Gorge cuts through the Teno massif in the north-western corner of Tenerife, a world of sheer walls, tight bends and layered basalt far removed from the island's resort coasts.
Did you know? A land snail found nowhere else, Hemicycla mascaensis, is named after the village.
24 Montañas del Fuego
Monumento Natural de Las Montañas del Fuego
Spain · 20.6 km from Arrecife29.000° N 13.746° W
H. Zell · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Montañas del Fuego — the Fire Mountains — are a crowd of volcanic cones in the heart of Lanzarote's Timanfaya National Park, their slopes streaked in rust red, ochre, black and violet ash, rising out of a sea of frozen lava that stretches towards the Atlantic. Almost nothing grows here.
Did you know? Inside the restaurant, a glazed "dead garden" honours Hilario's legend with the skeleton of a dromedary and a burnt tree trunk set on volcanic ash.
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 places in the Canary Islands?
- On our list, Teide ranks first, followed by Playa de Cofete and Jameos del Agua.
- Why are the Canary Islands volcanic?
- They formed over a hotspot beneath the African plate, where molten rock rises from deep in the mantle. As the plate moved slowly, new islands were built in turn, which is why the eastern islands are older and more eroded than La Palma and El Hierro in the west.
- What is the highest mountain in Spain?
- Teide on Tenerife, at about 3,715 metres above sea level. Measured from the ocean floor it is one of the tallest volcanoes on Earth.
- Why is the lagoon at El Golfo in Lanzarote green?
- Charco Verde sits inside a half-eroded volcanic crater and is fed by seawater seeping through the sand. Its colour comes from algae that thrive in the salty, still water, set off by the black beach around it.
- What kinds of places are there to see in the Canary Islands?
- In our collection, the places in the Canary Islands are most often national parks (4), islands (3), nature sanctuaries (3) and volcanoes (2).
- How many places are on this list in the Canary Islands?
- The list covers 24 places.