The British & the Canary Islands

The bond between Britain and the Canary Islands is far older than the package holiday — it stretches back some five centuries, forged first by wine, then by merchants, banished briefly by cannon fire at Santa Cruz, and finally cemented by bananas and tourism. Long before the first charter flight, English ships were loading sweet Canary wine, British firms were building the banana trade, and Nelson himself left a piece of Tenerife's history behind — along with his right arm. Understanding that long relationship makes it far more obvious why Britons and Irish became, and remain, the islands' most numerous visitors.

Canary sack: the wine that reached Shakespeare

The story begins with wine. From the 16th century the islands produced a prized sweet Malmsey — Malvasia — that English merchants shipped home in huge quantities under the name "Canary sack" or simply "Canary". It became a fashionable tipple in Tudor and Stuart England, celebrated on the stage: Shakespeare has his characters call for "a cup of canary", and the wine turns up as a byword for something rich and warming in the plays of the age. For over a century this golden wine was one of the great luxury trades of the Atlantic, and it planted the first deep commercial roots between the islands and Britain. You can follow that heritage in our guide to Canary wine.

British merchants in the north

Where the wine went, merchants followed. English and, later, Scottish and Irish traders settled in the northern ports of Tenerife and Gran Canaria, building warehouses, trading houses and connections that lasted generations. Puerto de la Cruz — then known to the British simply as Puerto Orotava — grew into a genteel enclave where northern European visitors came for the mild climate as much as the commerce. This northern, trading, outward-looking character was set centuries ago and never really left; the islands have looked towards Britain, and Britain towards them, for a very long time. The wider sweep of that story is told in our short history of the Canary Islands.

Nelson's failed attack on Santa Cruz, 1797

Not every British arrival was welcome. In July 1797, at the height of the wars with revolutionary France and Spain, Rear-Admiral Horatio Nelson led a bold assault on Santa Cruz de Tenerife, hoping to seize the town and a rumoured treasure ship. It went badly wrong. The island's defenders, under General Antonio Gutierrez, repulsed the landing with heavy British losses, and in the fighting Nelson was hit in the right arm by grapeshot. The arm was amputated aboard ship that same night; he would carry the empty sleeve for the rest of his life.

It remains one of the very few defeats of Nelson's career, and the people of Santa Cruz have never forgotten it. The cannon said to have fired the fateful shot — nicknamed "El Tigre" — is still displayed in the city, and the episode is a point of local pride to this day. It is a curious footnote in the long relationship: the Royal Navy's future hero left part of himself on Tenerife.

Bananas and the British-financed boom

The 19th century brought a new and even more consequential British involvement: fruit. British trading companies — names like Fyffes and Yeoward among them — helped finance and organise the banana plantations that transformed the wetter northern coasts, and built the shipping lines that carried the fruit to markets in Britain and beyond. British capital and know-how also helped develop the free ports of Las Palmas and Santa Cruz into busy coaling stations for the steamships crossing the Atlantic, giving the islands a central place in imperial trade routes. The plantations still carpet the northern valleys today — the full story is in our guide to the bananas of the Canary Islands. This was also the era of another British-linked cash crop, the crimson dye described in our piece on cochineal and the red gold.

From invalids to invaders of sun

Tourism, too, began with the British. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, well-to-do Britons sailed south to winter in the mild air of Puerto de la Cruz and Las Palmas, often on doctors' advice; grand hotels rose to receive them, and guidebooks sang the praises of the "fortunate isles". These early health-and-leisure travellers were the direct ancestors of today's holidaymaker, and they established the reputation for reliable winter sun that still draws millions each year. Explore the island that started it all in our Tenerife guide.

Why Brits and Irish became the biggest visitors

When cheap air travel arrived from the 1960s, all these threads came together. The islands already had the climate, the harbours, the long familiarity with British tastes and, crucially, an established connection in the British imagination as a warm, friendly, easy place to escape a northern winter. Package holidays did the rest, and the southern coasts of Tenerife, Gran Canaria, Lanzarote and Fuerteventura filled with British and Irish visitors. The four-hour flight, the year-round warmth, the low local taxes, the familiar comforts alongside genuine Spanish character — all of it built on foundations laid centuries earlier by wine ships and merchants.

A five-century friendship

So the next time you raise a glass on a Tenerife terrace, remember that Britons were doing much the same five hundred years ago, only with Canary sack rather than a cold beer. From Shakespeare's cup of canary to Nelson's lost arm, from banana boats to budget airlines, the ties between these Atlantic islands and the British Isles run remarkably deep — which is exactly why they feel, to so many British and Irish visitors, so instantly like a home from home in the sun.