Canarian tourism did not begin with the package holiday. It began more than a century earlier with sick Victorians, sent south by their doctors to breathe air that never got cold, and delivered here on British banana boats. Everything that followed — the charter jets, the towers, the all-inclusive wristband — is built on a health-resort industry that was already mature before the First World War.

The sequence runs roughly like this. From the 1880s the islands sold climate to the wealthy sick and the wealthy curious. From the 1960s they sold sunshine to ordinary Northern European families in enormous numbers. In between, the whole economic centre of gravity shifted from farming in the green north of each island to hotels on the dry southern coasts — which is why the map of where Canarians live today looks nothing like the map of where they lived in 1950.

It is worth understanding, because it explains almost everything a visitor notices: why the prettiest towns are on the wrong side of the island for the weather, why the resorts look the way they do, and why the islands argue as fiercely as they do about what tourism has cost them.

The invalids of Puerto de la Cruz

Nineteenth-century medicine had very little to offer tuberculosis except air, and British physicians developed an elaborate theory of which airs were best. Madeira was the established destination; the Canaries were the challenger, marketed as drier and steadier. The northern valley of Tenerife, sheltered and green, became the prescription of choice, and the small port town of Puerto de la Cruz — then usually called Puerto de la Orotava — filled with British consumptives, their families and their doctors.

They needed somewhere to stay, and in 1890 they got it: the Gran Hotel Taoro, a vast pile on the hill above the town, built by a company set up explicitly to provide a hotel and sanatorium for the valley. It was the grandest building on the islands, with terraces, gardens and a view over the whole valley to Teide. The same decade brought the Santa Catalina in Las Palmas and a scatter of hill hotels behind it. Our page on the islands' historic hotels covers what survives of the period.

The book that started it

Here is the unique detail. A great deal of the Victorian rush can be traced to one woman. In 1887 Olivia Stone published Tenerife and its Six Satellites, two volumes based on a long journey she and her husband made around all seven islands, much of it by mule and on foot, at a time when almost no foreigner went beyond the ports. It was detailed, practical, opinionated and widely read, and it functioned as the first proper guidebook to the archipelago in English.

The effect was immediate: British visitors began arriving with her itinerary, hotels opened along it, and the islands acquired an English-speaking clientele decades before anyone thought of them as a holiday destination. There is a case for calling Olivia Stone the single most commercially consequential tourist the Canaries have ever had.

Coal, bananas and the ships that carried people as a sideline

None of it would have worked without British shipping. From the 1880s Las Palmas developed the Puerto de la Luz, and British merchant houses built it into one of the Atlantic's great coaling stations — a place where every steamer heading to West Africa or South America stopped to bunker. Those firms, with names still visible on buildings and street signs in Las Palmas, ran the ships, the coal, the insurance and increasingly the farms.

What went back north was fruit. British companies planted and shipped the Canary banana to Liverpool and London on a weekly schedule, and those banana boats carried passengers in the spare cabins. For decades the standard way to reach the islands from Britain was to book a berth on a fruit liner: a comfortable week at sea, arriving at the quay in Santa Cruz or Las Palmas. The wider story of that whole commercial relationship is in our piece on the British and the Canaries.

The long interruption

Two world wars and the Spanish Civil War effectively shut the trade down. British residents left; the grand hotels emptied or were requisitioned; the islands spent the 1940s and much of the 1950s poor, isolated and hungry, with emigration to Venezuela and Cuba running at a rate that left villages half-empty. Anyone who tells you Canarian tourism runs in an unbroken line from the Victorians is skipping forty very hard years.

1960s: the jet changes everything

What restarted it was aircraft. Cheap, reliable jets and the invention of the inclusive charter holiday turned a four-day sea voyage into a four-hour flight, and suddenly a climate that was pleasant in January was worth an enormous amount of money to a country with nothing much else to sell.

The transformation was fastest in the south of Gran Canaria, where one family owned a large stretch of empty coastal land around the dunes. In 1961 they ran an international urban design competition for what became the Maspalomas Costa Canaria — a planned resort city on bare sand and scrub, with zones for hotels, apartments, shopping and greenery. What got built diverged substantially from what was drawn, as it always does, but it seeded Playa del Inglés and Maspalomas, and by the early 1970s the old goat pastures were a skyline.

Tenerife followed on its own southern coast at Playa de las Américas, then far faster once a second airport opened in the south of the island in the late 1970s — before which every visitor to the sunny end of Tenerife had to land in the cloudy north and drive an hour and a half. That is why the island still has two airports today.

What it did to the coast

The honest summary is that a generation of building happened faster than any planning system could handle. Whole coastlines went from nothing to continuous urbanisation in fifteen years. Some of it was well done; a great deal of it was cheap high-rise thrown up to a formula, and the resorts that get criticised hardest today are mostly the ones built quickest between about 1968 and 1980.

The social effects were just as large. Farm labour walked off the terraces to work in construction and hotels, at wages agriculture could not match. Population drained from the green interior to the dry coast. Water and electricity demand exploded on the islands least able to supply it. And an economy that had been unstable but diverse — sugar, wine, cochineal, tomatoes, bananas, coal — became a single-sector economy almost overnight, which is the central issue in the islands' economy today.

The man who argued back

The counter-example is Lanzarote, and it is largely one person's doing. César Manrique returned from New York in the mid-1960s, looked at what was happening on the other islands, and spent the rest of his life campaigning for a different model: low buildings, no high-rise, no roadside advertising, white walls with green or blue woodwork, and attractions built into the landscape rather than on top of it. He had the ear of the island council and he won most of the arguments.

The result is that Lanzarote today looks deliberate in a way its neighbours do not, and that the sites he created are the island's main draw. He did something similar in Tenerife: the seafront lido complex at Lago Martiánez in Puerto de la Cruz was his answer to a town with poor beaches, and it is still in daily use.

Where it has got to

The islands now receive visitors in the mid-teens of millions a year — several times the resident population, concentrated on a handful of coastal strips. The industry has moved upmarket in places: the newer developments in Costa Adeje and around Meloneras are low-rise, landscaped and expensive, aimed squarely at replacing volume with value. Rural tourism, hiking, diving and stargazing have grown into real sectors on the islands that never got a package boom.

And there is an argument going on. Since 2024 there have been large public demonstrations across the islands about housing costs, holiday lets, road congestion and pressure on protected landscapes — not against visitors as such, but against a model residents feel they no longer control. It is the same conversation happening in Barcelona and Venice, arriving in a place where tourism is not a nuisance but the entire economy.

The bottom line

A hundred and forty years ago the islands sold air to the dying; today they sell February sunshine to about fifteen million people, and almost everything you see on the coast was built inside one human lifetime. Knowing that makes the resorts far more interesting to walk around, and it makes the surviving Victorian corners of Puerto de la Cruz — the botanical garden planted in 1788, the old hotel on the hill, the English church — feel like the first chapter rather than a curiosity.

If you want the shape of the modern industry rather than its history, our guide to how package holidays to the islands work picks up where this leaves off.