The Most Beautiful Places in Las Palmas
12 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Las Palmas are Lanzarote, Roque Nublo and Cueva de los Verdes. The list covers 12 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
The province of Las Palmas covers the eastern Canary Islands — Gran Canaria, Lanzarote and Fuerteventura — and it is the Atlantic at its most volcanic. Lying close to the coast of Africa, the islands are drier and windier than their western neighbours, and their landscapes are often bare enough to read like a geology textbook: lava fields, cinder cones, sand blown in long dunes. On Lanzarote the artist César Manrique turned this raw material into architecture, setting a model for building with a volcanic landscape rather than against it.
Lanzarote holds much of the list. The Montañas del Fuego in Timanfaya were formed in the great eruptions of the 1730s, which buried a large part of the island under lava and ash. In La Geria, vines grow in pits dug into black volcanic gravel, each sheltered by a low stone wall, and at El Golfo the Charco Verde lagoon lies vivid green beside a dark beach. The Cueva de los Verdes follows a long lava tube, and Manrique's Mirador del Río and Jardín de Cactus show his art at its best.
The other islands bring different shapes. In the centre of Gran Canaria, the volcanic monolith of Roque Nublo stands on a summit plateau, while on its southern tip the Maspalomas Dunes roll down to the sea. On Fuerteventura's Jandía peninsula, Playa de Cofete stretches for kilometres beneath steep mountains with hardly a building in sight.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lanzarote | Island | |
| 2 | Roque Nublo | Rock formation | |
| 3 | Cueva de los Verdes | Lava tube | |
| 4 | Maspalomas Dunes | Nature reserve | |
| 5 | Jameos del Agua | Lava tube | |
| 6 | Jardín de Cactus | Botanical garden | |
| 7 | Charco Verde | Lagoon | |
| 8 | Timanfaya National Park | National park | |
| 9 | Mirador del Río | Scenic viewpoint | |
| 10 | La Geria | Vineyard landscape | |
| 11 | Playa de Cofete | Beach | |
| 12 | Montañas del Fuego | Volcano |
01 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.
02 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.
03 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.
04 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.
05 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.
06 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.
07 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.
08 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.
09 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.
10 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.
11 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.
12 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 Las Palmas?
- On our list, Lanzarote ranks first, followed by Roque Nublo and Cueva de los Verdes.
- Who was César Manrique?
- César Manrique was a Lanzarote-born artist and architect who campaigned to protect the island from high-rise development. He designed sites such as the Jameos del Agua, the Mirador del Río and the Jardín de Cactus, blending them into the volcanic landscape.
- How are vines grown in La Geria?
- Farmers dig pits through the layer of volcanic gravel left by the 18th-century eruptions to reach the soil beneath, and build semicircular stone walls to shield each vine from the wind. The porous gravel traps moisture from night air and rare rain.
- Why is the lagoon at El Golfo green?
- Charco Verde fills part of an old volcanic crater and is linked to the sea through the sand. Its intense green colour comes from algae living in the very salty water.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Las Palmas?
- In our collection, the places in Las Palmas are most often lava tubes (2), viewpoints (2), rock formations (1) and volcanoes (1).
- How many places are on this list in Las Palmas?
- The list covers 12 places.