Despite their geographical isolation, these islands have, since the 1960s, seen a ferocious development of their tourism industry (it represents 80 per cent of the annual revenue), and they now welcome 9.2 million visitors a year after easily accessible sun and sea holidays. Yet there is another side to the Canary Islands: lush banana plantations clinging to the sides of villages, tiny villages dating back to the 16th century, a gigantic volcano on Tenerife, and, on another island, sand dunes that look as though they should be in Namibia. These seven islands, although obviously connected, have such strikingly dissimilar looks and character, that it is impossible to explore every island unless you have several weeks on your hands.
Where to stay in Canary Islands
THE BEST HOTELS IN LA GOMERA
PARADOR DE LA GOMERA
This is the best hotel in San Sebastián. Though new, it looks like a colonial mansion and has a spectacular garden and pool. £
Lomo de la Horca (+ 34 922 871 100; paradors.net)
THE HOTEL JARDÍN TECINA
This is less charming than the Parador de la Gomera, but has several pools, tennis courts and a beach. £
Playa de Santiago (00 34 922 145850; jardin-tecina.com)
THE BEST HOTELS IN LANZAROTE
FINCA DE LAS SALINAS
Manrique had a hand in converting the 18th-century Finca de las Salinas into a hotel. £
17 Calle La Cuesta (00 34 928 830 325; fincasalinas.com)
GRAN MELIA SALINAS
This is partly designed by César Manrique and overlooks a spectacular bay.
Avenida Islas Canarias (00 34 928 590 040; granmeliasalinas.solmelia.com)
THE BEST HOTELS IN TENERIFE
HOTEL AGUERE
Ask for room 103, which is enormous and has an original wooden floor. £
55 Calle Carrera, Garachico (00 34 922 259490)
HOTEL LA QUINTA ROJA
Another option is the Hotel La Quinta Roja, a colonial palacio off the main Plaza de la Libertad. The food is very good, with an emphasis on local wine and ingredients, including honey from Teide mountain. £
Glorieta de San Francisco (00 34 922 133377; quintaroja.com)
THE HOTEL SAN ROQUE
This has a stylish interior, and a pool in the middle of the patio, which is overlooked by verandahs. ££
32 Calle Esteban de Ponte; 00 34 922 133435; (hotelsanroque.com)
Where to eat out in Canary Islands
WHERE TO EAT IN LA GOMERA
EL SILBO
Serves terrific grilled cuttlefish and has great views. Go here for good local dishes at reasonable prices.
Carretera General, Hermigua 102 (00 34 922 880304)
ROQUE BLANCO
Specialises in grilled meats. The island has a number of culinary specialities of which it is fiercely proud, including watercress soup and almogrote, a piquant sauce made of grated hard cheese, black pepper, oil and tomato. Its most celebrated product is miel de palma, a syrup made from the concentrated sap of the local palm tree
Barrio Las Rosas, 2 (00 34 922 800483)
WHERE TO EAT IN LANZAROTE
EL DIABLO
A restaurant in Timanfaya National Park offers dishes grilled over a volcanic pit.
Carretera Yaiza-Tinajo (00 34 928 840 056)
LA ERA
La Era serves local specialities such as puchero canario (hotpot) and watercress soup.
Trasera del Ayutamiento(00 34 928 830 016)
LAGOMAR
Manrique designed Lagomar as a villa for Omar Sharif, set into the side of a mountain. It is now a restaurant and bar.
Calle Los Loros 6 (00 34 928 845 665; lag-o-mar.com)
MIRADOR DEL RIO
Originally a military fort, Mirador del Rio was converted by Manrique into a restaurant in 1973.
(+34 901 20 03 00)
WHERE TO EAT IN TENERIFE
EL PRINCIPITO
This is a particularly imaginative restaurant.
Calle de Santo Domingo 26 (00 34 922 633 916)
TASCA LA CARPINTERIA
This is cosy and informal and specialises in ham; great haunches of jamón Ibérico hang from the ceiling. In La Orotava, the Iglesia de la Concepción is a superb example of Canary baroque.
Calle de Nuňez de la Peňa 14 (00 34 922 263 056)
LA PALMA
The island makes an excellent goat's cheese, Queso Palmero, with its own Denominación de Origen. The island has a sweet tooth; its dessert repertoire includes bienmesabe ('tastes good to me'), a syrupsoaked sponge of agonising sweetness, marquesotes (sweetmeats made from maize flour) and Príncipe Alberto, a layered confection of chocolate mousse, almonds and sponge, like a version of tiramisú.
EL HIERRO
It has as a rich gastronomy out of all proportion to its size. The fish at La Restinga village is freshly landed and keenly priced: try the viejas, rancho (fish stew), or rice with limpets. From the land comes rabbit en salmorejo, broad beans with pork, and egg soup.
What to see in Canary Islands
WHAT TO SEE IN LA GOMERA
This island is only 22km across at its widest and has difficult, mountainous terrain with no beaches to speak of, so tourism tends to consist of trekkers more interested in flora and fauna than in getting a tan. Without a doubt, the most exciting thing that ever happened to La Gomera was Christopher Columbus. It likes to call itself La Isla Colombina. He stopped here three times - in 1492, 1493 and 1498 - on his terrifying voyages into the unknown.
A hero, however, cannot be expected to live on water and prayers alone. Which is where Beatriz de Bobadilla comes into the picture. She is said to have barricaded herself in this very tower in 1488, after her husband was murdered by the indigenous Guanche people, who had taken a dim view of his carrying on with one of their princesses. The widow Beatriz was rescued, and fours year later she welcomed Columbus to her island. He returned to La Gomera on his next two voyages, but by the time of his fourth and final journey to the New World, in 1502, Beatriz had married the governor of Tenerife, and Columbus apparently saw no reason to visit the island ever again.
Food is always a reflection of the society it has evolved in, and so it isn't too surprising that the cuisine of the Canaries is robust rather than sophisticated. For most of the islands' history, life was fairly precarious, and the emphasis was on cheap and satisfying local produce. Even today, no meal is complete without papas arrugadas - potatoes cooked in their skins, sprinkled with salt and served with two sauces, mojo verde and mojo picon. And gofio - a ground mixture of toasted wheat, maize and barley - remains a staple in the Canary diet.
WHAT TO SEE IN LANZAROTE
See our guide to Lanzarote.
It is extremely rare for one man to leave his imprint on an entire island, but such is the case with César Manrique and Lanzarote. Of course, in the old nature-versus-nurture argument, Lanzarote's biological father must have been the god Vulcan, who was responsible for its volcanic temperament and physiognomy, as well as its nickname, Isla del Fuego.
It has a landscape unlike anything I have ever seen, pock-marked with more than 300 volcanic cones: some tiny, some huge, some with gaping calderas, and all covered in a kind of rough shale in a palette that ranges from coal-black to slate-grey and from a rusty, reddish brown to an almost mustard yellow. The only clue that this moonscape might be inhabited is the scattered oases of starkly white, flat-roofed houses trimmed with bright-green shutters and surrounded by palm trees. Which is where Lanzarote's other, nurturing father, César Manrique, enters the picture.
Manrique was born here in 1919, became an artist, travelled to Madrid and New York, but returned to Lanzarote in the late 1960s to paint and sculpt, as well as to embark on an energetic campaign to preserve and transform the place he loved most. His art, somewhat derivative of Picasso's and Miró's, is interesting, but his true genius was in seeing how to integrate architecture into the bizarre topography. His seven major projects dominate the island, and he was also able to persuade - or bully - the local government into restoring old buildings and, far more crucially, maintain strict control of development.
His house was transformed into the Fundación César Manrique shortly before his death in 1992, and the structure was inspired by and built upon five cave-like lava bubbles formed during the great volcanic eruptions of the 1730s, which devastated a third of the island. The first courtyard is planted with cacti and decorated with a mural composed of bleached animal skulls and bones, and then into the house itself, a series of white cubes. A green fig tree grows up from one of the caves into the centre of a room. From the window of another you can see the ossified lava river that flowed down the slope and which appears to come through the plate glass and spill onto the tiled floor. In the first cave are low banquettes covered in tomato-red vinyl and built into the rough rock of the circular walls.
Manrique's first project is in the north, at the foot of the Monte Corona volcano: Los Jameos del Agua is based on the same principle as his house, except that the caves are 10 times the size, and even more dramatic. At the end of the cavern is a long, dimly-lit bar and dining tables arranged on different levels, all overlooking an immense rock pool. Just in case you are tempted to photograph this Flintstones-inspired dining room, a polite sign asks you not to, because the flash might upset the thousands of apparently endangered blind crabs that live in the depths of the pool.
- Places to StayThe best beach hotels in Europe
Even further north, on a cliff above the ocean, is a fort that had been built during the Spanish-American War to defend Lanzarote against attack by the Yanquis. It is now the Mirador del Río bar and restaurant. To the south, in Arrecife, Manrique had transformed another fort, the Castillo San José, into a museum of contemporary art. King Carlos III had the castle built between 1776 and 1779 to make work for the desperate, starving population. The staggering poverty of the Canaries, which only began to be relieved by tourism in the 1960s and then by Spain's entry into the European Union in 1986, resulted in several waves of emigration, mainly to Venezuela but also to Colombia and Cuba. In addition to the museum, Manrique persuaded Madrid to create the Timanfaya National Park in one of the wildest parts of Lanzarote, where he also designed a restaurant, El Diablo, that uses the heat, bubbling away just below the surface, to fuel the kitchen's barbecue.
WHAT TO SEE IN TENERIFE
- Places to StayThe best beach hotels in Europe
The snow-covered cone of Teide dominates Tenerife and is the highest mountain in Spain. The village of Garachico has no beaches, no big hotels and no discotecas, but plenty of well-preserved colonial architecture and a restaurant right on the water that serves delicious choco (cuttlefish). Garachico had slipped off the radar screen and sunk into obscurity because of a series of natural disasters, culminating in a volcanic eruption in 1706 that destroyed the port and covered half the town in lava.
Founded in the 16th century by Genoese merchants, Garachico was once the island's principal port and a centre of sugar production. The farther you climb away from the cafés and shops on the seafront, the more the town seems to sink back in time. I turned a corner and stood looking up at the flaking, ochre façade of a 17th-century palacio, its windows shuttered and doors bolted. It had seen everything, survived the worst, and appeared to return my gaze with an air of benign indifference and quiet invincibility.
Make sure you visit two stunning colonial towns, La Laguna and La Orotava, as well as the Santiago Calatrava auditorium in Santa Cruz, which will give you a palate-cleansing jolt of 21st-century architecture after a steady diet of ancient stones and lava. Santa Cruz recruited Calatrava to jazz up this port city with his famously dynamic style. They gave him a stellar location - a breezy, wide-open space right on the water - although the result got a mixed reception from the critics.
I don't think I have ever seen a Calatrava building that wasn't white, and the auditorium is no exception. This palette works best in a climate such as Tenerife's, which guarantees the perfect backdrop: a clear, cloudless, sapphire sky year-round. Is it a bird, is it a sail, is it the reincarnation of the Concorde's nose? Who knows? But there it is, swooping down over Santa Cruz with its gigantic, white sails/wings and its pointy beak/nose, a dazzling rebuke to all the mediocre modern architecture that surrounds it.
How to get to Canary Islands
Gran Canaria, Tenerife and Lanzarote all have international airports. British Airways (0844 493 0787; ba.com) flies from Gatwick to Tenerife and Lanzarote. Flights to La Palma, El Hierro and La Gomera with Binter Canarias (bintercanarias.com) leave from Tenerife North airport. There is a regular bus service between the airports. Armas (navieraarmas.com) and Fred Olsen (fredolsen.es) operate ferries to the smaller islands from Los Cristianos.