Canarians are Spanish citizens who very often describe themselves as Canarian first, and frequently as islanders before that — but actual support for independence from Spain has never got much beyond a small minority, and the islands' nationalist parties have spent decades bargaining for money and autonomy rather than for a border.
That combination — strong identity, weak separatism — surprises people who arrive expecting something like Catalonia. The explanations are geographic, economic and, most of all, internal: the biggest obstacle to Canarian nationalism has always been that Canarians do not agree with each other, and the argument between Tenerife and Gran Canaria is older, sharper and more consuming than any argument with Madrid.
Here is how the islands are actually governed, what the nationalists want, and how islanders answer the question of who they are.
What "autonomous community" means
The Canary Islands became one of Spain's seventeen autonomous communities under a Statute of Autonomy passed in 1982. The islands have their own parliament, their own president and government, and control over health, education, tourism, transport, agriculture, culture and a good deal else. Madrid keeps defence, foreign affairs, the courts and the big taxes. A reformed statute in 2018 strengthened the arrangement and formally described the Canarian people as a nacionalidad — a term with real weight in Spanish constitutional language, sitting a notch above a mere region.
On top of that sits something more unusual. The islands have a distinct economic and fiscal regime, recognised in EU law under the "outermost regions" provisions, which gives them their own lower sales tax, duty concessions and subsidy channels. Practically, autonomy here has always been about that regime more than about flags, and every Canarian government of any colour defends it — as our page on the islands' low tax explains from a visitor's side.
Two capitals, and why
The Canaries are the only Spanish region with two capitals, and it is not a quirk of drafting — it is a truce. Santa Cruz de Tenerife and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria have competed for primacy since the nineteenth century in a running feud known as the pleito insular, the island lawsuit. It ran through customs privileges, bishoprics, ports and university chairs; it produced a formal division into two provinces in 1927; and it has never really stopped.
The compromise is elaborate. The regional parliament sits in Santa Cruz. The presidency of the government alternates between the two cities from one legislature to the next, with ministries split between them, so civil servants and ministers spend a remarkable amount of time on aeroplanes. The high court sits in Las Palmas. Nobody defends the efficiency of this; nobody will touch it either.
The cabildos are the layer that matters most day to day. Created in 1912, these island councils give each island — including tiny El Hierro — its own directly elected government with real powers over roads, water, culture and planning. They exist nowhere else in Spain, they are the reason each island feels administratively distinct, and they are a large part of why Canarian politics is island politics.
The nationalist parties
Canarian nationalism in electoral politics is overwhelmingly moderate. Coalición Canaria, formed from a merger of island-based parties in the 1990s, has been the dominant nationalist force and has held the regional presidency repeatedly, usually by holding the balance between the big Spanish parties and trading support in Madrid for concessions on funding, transport subsidy and the fiscal regime. Nueva Canarias plays a similar hand from Gran Canaria. On La Gomera a purely island-based party has repeatedly held a seat in the national parliament.
None of these are independence parties. Their programme is more autonomy, better financing, recognition of the islands' distance and cost, and protection of the special tax regime. Explicitly separatist parties do stand, and they do not win seats.
The MPAIAC, and the darkest footnote
There was a militant independence movement, and its story is worth telling properly. The Movement for the Self-Determination and Independence of the Canarian Archipelago was founded in 1964 by the Tenerife lawyer Antonio Cubillo, who operated from exile in Algiers and broadcast propaganda back to the islands by radio. He argued that the Canaries were an African territory under Spanish colonial occupation, and he lobbied the Organisation of African Unity on exactly those terms with some early success.
The movement carried out bombings in the 1970s. On 27 March 1977 an explosion in the terminal at Gran Canaria's airport, for which the MPAIAC claimed responsibility, closed the airport and diverted incoming flights to Los Rodeos in the north of Tenerife — where, in fog, two Boeing 747s collided on the runway, killing 583 people in the worst accident in aviation history. The bomb did not cause the crash, and the chain of causation was long, but it is part of it, and it destroyed whatever public sympathy armed Canarian separatism had.
Cubillo himself was stabbed and gravely injured in Algiers in 1978 by attackers subsequently linked in a Spanish court to agents acting for the state; he was later awarded compensation. He returned to the islands in the 1980s, renounced armed struggle, stood in elections and won almost no votes. He died in 2012.
Why independence stays a minority view
Several reasons stack up, and money is the biggest.
- The islands are net beneficiaries. EU and Spanish transfers, agricultural support for bananas, transport subsidies for residents' flights and ferries, and the special fiscal regime all flow inward. Independence means renegotiating all of it from outside both Spain and, almost certainly, the EU.
- There is no language question. Canarians speak Spanish. The distinctiveness is in accent and vocabulary, as our page on Canarian Spanish describes, not in a separate tongue — which removes the engine that drives Catalan and Basque nationalism.
- The islands do not act as one. Any Canarian state would immediately have to settle the capital question, and the pleito insular suggests how that would go.
- Tourism. An economy that depends on frictionless arrivals from northern Europe has structural reasons to stay inside the EU's arrangements.
Polling consistently shows support for outright independence in low single figures to the low teens depending on how the question is asked, well behind support for more autonomy within Spain. What has grown sharply is something adjacent: the sense that the islands' land, housing and coastline are being decided by people who do not live here, which surfaced in the 2024 protests over housing and tourism limits. That is a different argument with a different constituency, and treating it as separatism misreads it.
How islanders describe themselves
Start at the smallest unit and work outwards, because that is how it works here. Ask someone where they are from and you will very often get the island, not the archipelago: palmero from La Palma, gomero from La Gomera, herreño from El Hierro, majorero from Fuerteventura, conejero from Lanzarote, tinerfeño from Tenerife, chicharrero specifically from Santa Cruz, canarión from Gran Canaria. Each carries a set of affectionate stereotypes the others enjoy repeating.
Then Canarian. Then, usually and unemotionally, Spanish. The mainland gets its own label: godo, from the Visigoths, an old word for a peninsular Spaniard that ranges from joking to genuinely rude depending entirely on tone and who is saying it. Visitors should hear it and not use it.
The Guanche revival
Here is the change that tells you most about modern Canarian identity, and you can read it in any school register. Since the 1980s there has been a strong revival of interest in the pre-conquest islanders, and one of its most visible expressions is naming. Children across the archipelago are given names drawn from the indigenous languages — Yeray, Acaymo, Gara, Idaira, Airam, Beneharo, Dailos, Nayra — at a rate that was unthinkable before democracy. Two or three generations ago those names belonged to statues and legends.
The same current runs through the revival of Canarian wrestling and stick fighting, the study and protection of Silbo Gomero on La Gomera, which is now taught in island schools and listed by UNESCO, and the seriousness with which island music and folklore are taken. Whether the modern reconstruction is historically exact matters less than what it does: it gives Canarians a past that is theirs and not Castile's — which is the real content of the Guanche question today.
Spanish, African, Atlantic or American?
All four claims get made. Geographically the islands are off Africa, a point the independence movement leaned on hard and which our page on whether the Canaries are in Spain or Africa unpicks. Culturally the strongest external pull is westward: centuries of emigration to Cuba and Venezuela, and of the returning indianos who came home with money, left the islands with a Caribbean-sounding accent, Latin American vocabulary, a taste for Cuban music, and families with cousins in Caracas. A Canarian in Havana sounds local. A Canarian in Madrid does not.
What this means for a visitor
Very little, practically, and quite a lot in terms of courtesy. Do not assume that praising "Spain" lands as a compliment; people are usually pleased to be recognised as Canarian and delighted to be recognised as being from their own island. Learn the difference between the islands rather than treating them as interchangeable. The Día de Canarias on 30 May is a genuine national day and worth catching if your dates fit — it is on our list of island public holidays. And if you see the seven-star flag on a balcony, it is one of the islands' unofficial symbols, not an invitation to debate.
The bottom line
The Canaries are a self-governing region of Spain with a fierce local identity, two capitals that refuse to merge, eight island governments, a moderate nationalist tradition that trades votes for funding, and an independence movement that peaked half a century ago and has never recovered. What is growing instead is a demand for control over land, housing and the pace of tourism — which is the argument you are actually likely to encounter, on a banner, during your week here.