Gran Canaria Arrival

The next leg on my trip was the Canary Islands. I had a layover from Alicante to Madrid before finally making it into Las Palmas. After a very long layover, I was beginning to wear down from the recent full days of travel.

I made it into Las Palmas in the early evening. The owner of the Airbnb I was staying at had his sister meet me there. She let me inside, showed the apartment, and told me the house rules. He warned me she only spoke Spanish. I did my best to understand the conversation, but reading and writing Spanish is one thing; listening to it is another. There was a lot of pointing around at things to explain. I am very sure I misunderstood at least a few things. My main takeaway was that if I drank the tap water it would be so bad that I would be propelled off of the toilet seat. 

After unpacking (yes, I am an unpacker and have to organize everything in closets and drawers. I hate having to rustle through my luggage), I walked around the neighborhood a bit. If there was one main takeaway, it is that Las Palmas was not at all what I was expecting. It’s a huge, sprawling city that is very self-sustaining and actually seems to be very minimally built off of tourism. Perhaps that’s the case in other cities on Gran Canaria and the other islands, but I definitely did not get that vibe from Las Palmas. There are also signs and graffiti telling tourist and digital nomads to go home. A few weeks ago, there were anti-tourist protests on another island, but I hadn’t heard of any on this one. It definitely does not make you feel welcome. 

The Canary Islands have always been high on my list (I’m not sure why), but that first night I definitely had a mini panic attack that I made a wrong decision in going there. I don’t think it’s a great place to travel alone, and you need to rent a car to see most of the main tourist attractions on the island. The weather was also finicky; I planned on going to the beach most days, but the weather throughout my visit was cloudy, windy, and in the upper 60s/low 70s. 

On my second day, I decided to do something I have never done before: take a “hop on, hop off” tourist bus. I was not in a mood to figure out the local bus system and could not find any general walking tours for the city. I like learning something about a city when I’m visiting, and it’s hard to do that without a tour guide.

The bus tour was expensive for what it was, but it made getting around the city easy. Everything in Las Palmas is very spread out, and the bus made stops to most of the main attractions. I spent most of my time off the bus in the old town of Las Palmas, Vegueta, which I found the most interesting. It is filled with cobbled streets and colorful buildings, many of which date back to old colonial times. 

The Catedral de Santa Ana is one of the main attractions. Its scale is very hard to capture in photos, but it is enormous and towers over the core of Vegueta. There is a plaza across from the cathedral lined with palm trees, which made for great photo opportunities. I paid six Euros to get inside, and I am glad I did. While the inside of the cathedral is very understated (similar to many of the cathedrals I went through on this trip), the size is impressive, and it adds to the mystery of Vegueta. The ticket also allows you take stairs up to the roof of the cathedral, which provides sweeping views of Las Palmas and the Atlantic Ocean. This is something you definitely cannot miss if you travel to Las Palmas. 

Vegueta is full of shops and restaurants, so after sight seeing, I had lunch and did some shopping. The main pedestrian street was filled with life despite it being midday. I felt much more “welcome” here as a tourist than where I was staying. 

For the rest of the day, I explored a few other areas of the city, but highly recommend making Vegueta the core part of a visit. I wish I had stayed there rather than closer to the beach, as there was a bit more energy and more places to walk to.