About 2.2 million people live in the Canary Islands, and something in the region of fifteen million visitors arrive every year — so on any given day a meaningful slice of the population of these islands is a foreigner on holiday. That ratio is the single most important fact about the modern Canaries, and almost every argument islanders are currently having comes out of it.
The distribution is lopsided. Roughly four out of every five residents live on Tenerife or Gran Canaria, which have somewhere approaching a million people each. Lanzarote and Fuerteventura have populations in the low hundreds of thousands and growing fast. La Palma has under a hundred thousand; La Gomera and El Hierro have populations you would call a large town and a small one respectively; La Graciosa has a few hundred.
Put another way: the two big islands are properly urban places with motorways, universities, tram lines, container ports and traffic jams, and the other six are not. Visitors who form an impression of the archipelago from a week in one resort usually get this wrong in both directions.
Where people actually live
Not where their grandparents did. Until the 1960s the population sat in the green, farmed north of each big island — La Laguna, the Orotava valley, the north of Gran Canaria — because that is where the water and the land were. Tourism moved everyone south. The dry southern coasts, which supported goats and not much else, now hold the largest concentrations of hotels, apartments and the workforce that runs them.
The result is two capitals of comparable size — Santa Cruz de Tenerife and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, the latter one of the larger cities in Spain — plus a string of resort municipalities whose registered population is a fraction of the number of people actually sleeping there on a January night. That gap causes real problems for funding schools, clinics, water and rubbish collection.
The tourism share
Official estimates put tourism at roughly a third of the Canarian economy and around four jobs in every ten, directly or indirectly — a dependence higher than almost any comparable European region. Everything else in the economy is either supplying tourism, regulating it, or living in its shadow.
The upside is employment and a scale of infrastructure a region of two million would never otherwise have: eight airports, motorways, hospitals, a concert hall by Calatrava. The downside is concentration risk. When flights stop, as they did in 2020, the islands stop, and both the 2008 financial crisis and the pandemic hit here harder and longer than in most of Spain. Our page on how tourism was built covers how the islands got to this point.
Bananas, and the rest of agriculture
Farming is a small share of GDP and an enormous share of the landscape and the political conversation. The plátano is the flagship: several hundred thousand tonnes a year, almost all of it shipped to mainland Spain rather than exported further, grown on the best irrigated land and supported by EU payments designed for outermost regions. Take those payments away and the crop is not competitive with Latin American bananas, which is why the banana question is fought so hard in Brussels.
Beyond that: wine of increasing quality and stubbornly small quantity, goat's cheese with a genuine export reputation, tomatoes and cut flowers much reduced from their mid-century peak, and aloe. A large proportion of what islanders eat is imported, which is a nervous position for an archipelago to be in and a live topic in local politics. The wider picture is in our piece on island farming and the terraces.
Ports, fuel and fish
The other historic pillar is the sea. Las Palmas is one of the busiest ports in the mid-Atlantic, handling containers, transhipment, bunkering, repairs and the servicing of fishing fleets and offshore rigs working off West Africa. Santa Cruz does similar work on a smaller scale. It is unglamorous, it employs a lot of people, and it is the modern descendant of the coaling station the British built here in the 1880s.
The sky business
The most surprising sector is astronomy, and it is worth understanding because it is the one thing the islands have that literally cannot be bought elsewhere. The combination of high peaks, stable air above the trade-wind inversion and clear nights makes the ridges of La Palma and Tenerife among the best observing sites in the northern hemisphere. The Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma hosts telescopes belonging to a dozen-odd countries, including the Gran Telescopio Canarias, for years the largest single-aperture optical telescope in the world. The Teide Observatory does solar and robotic work. The national astrophysics institute is headquartered in La Laguna, and it employs scientists, engineers and technicians in numbers that matter on an island of eighty thousand people.
A 1988 Spanish law protects the skies above La Palma from light pollution, radio interference and flight paths — believed to be the first legislation of its kind anywhere — which is also why the island has become the archipelago's stargazing destination.
Here is the detail almost nobody notices. Behind the Maspalomas dunes, on the scrubby hill above the resort, sits a satellite tracking station with a field of white dishes. It has been operating since the 1960s, was part of the network that handled communications with the Apollo missions, and still tracks launches and satellites today. Several million people have sunbathed a couple of kilometres from it without once wondering what the dishes are for.
Tax, and why things cost less
The islands have a special economic and fiscal regime recognised in Spanish and EU law, on the grounds that being a small archipelago a long way from everywhere imposes permanent costs. In practice that means a local sales tax, IGIC, charged at a general rate far below mainland Spanish VAT; exemptions from certain duties; reduced rates on fuel, alcohol and tobacco; and a special zone offering a very low corporate tax rate to qualifying companies that create jobs here.
For a visitor the effect is visible at the till — the reason a tank of petrol, a bottle of spirits and a restaurant bill all come in under mainland prices, as our pages on IGIC and what things cost set out. For the islands it is a deliberate industrial policy, and it is part of what has drawn a real remote-working population to Las Palmas and Tenerife over the last decade.
The problems nobody is pretending away
Three numbers describe the awkward side of Canarian prosperity.
Unemployment has run consistently above the Spanish average and among the highest of any European region, sitting in the mid-teens in recent years even during good tourism seasons. A large share of the work is seasonal, part-time or on short contracts.
Poverty. On the standard EU measure of the population at risk of poverty or social exclusion, the Canaries come out near the top of the Spanish table, with something like a third of residents inside it. An economy dominated by low-wage service work produces a lot of people who are employed and still struggling.
Housing. This is the one that has boiled over. Rents and purchase prices have risen sharply, driven by holiday-let conversion, foreign buyers and a chronic shortage of new building on islands with severe land constraints. Workers in the resort municipalities increasingly cannot afford to live in them, and stories of hotel staff commuting an hour or sleeping in vans are not urban myths. The registration rules for holiday lets are being tightened island by island in response, and the argument over them is nowhere near finished.
2024 and the protests
In April 2024 tens of thousands of people demonstrated across all the islands under the slogan Canarias tiene un límite — the Canaries have a limit — and there have been further protests since. The demands are broadly about housing, an eco-tax, limits on new hotel construction, controls on land purchase and protection of fragile coastline, rather than about visitors as individuals. Most protesters are entirely clear that tourism pays the wages; the argument is about who sets the terms. It connects directly to the questions in our page on Canarian identity.
As a visitor you are extremely unlikely to encounter hostility. You may well see a banner, a sticker or a march, and it is worth understanding what it is about rather than taking it personally.
Who the islanders are now
Canarian society has been shaped by leaving and arriving in roughly equal measure. Generations emigrated to Cuba, Venezuela and later Latin America; many came back, and Venezuelan-Canarian families are a substantial community with an accent and a cuisine of their own. Today the islands have a large foreign-resident population — Italians, Britons, Germans, Colombians, Moroccans, Venezuelans — concentrated in the resort municipalities and the two cities.
The islands also sit on one of the Atlantic migration routes from West Africa, and arrivals by small boat have run into the tens of thousands in recent peak years. It is a serious humanitarian and political issue on the islands and it is almost entirely invisible from a resort.
The bottom line
The Canaries are a European region of two and a bit million people with a tourism-dominated economy, an unusually favourable tax regime, a world-class astronomy sector, a banana crop kept alive by subsidy, and a housing crisis it has not solved. It is far more of a real, functioning, argumentative society than the view from a sun lounger suggests.
Knowing that costs nothing and improves the trip. It also makes decisions like where to eat, where to stay and how to get around feel slightly less abstract, and it puts the prices on the menu board into a context most visitors never get.