Christmas on the Canary Islands is eaten on the evening of the 24th, not the middle of the 25th, and the table looks nothing like a British one — roast meat or baked fish, almond nougat, and a pastry stuffed with sweet potato that everyone calls a trout. If you are on the islands in December, that shift in timing is the thing to plan around. Restaurants and shops work to a different rhythm from the one you are used to, and the good stuff appears in the bakeries from the start of the month.
The framework is Spanish, with island variations. Nochebuena, Christmas Eve, is the main family dinner. Navidad, the 25th, is a quieter lunch with leftovers. Nochevieja, New Year's Eve, has its own rituals, and Reyes — Three Kings, the 6th of January — is the day children traditionally get their presents and the day the last cake is cut. The Canarian contribution to all of this is the sweet-potato pastry, a gofio pudding, and a general preference for fish where the mainland might roast a lamb.
What follows is what actually appears on the table, roughly in the order you would meet it.
Nochebuena: the timing
Dinner on the 24th does not start when a British Christmas dinner starts. Families gather from about nine in the evening, eat at ten or later, and are still at the table at one in the morning. The old pattern was to eat after or around Misa del Gallo, the "rooster's mass" at midnight, and although far fewer people go to mass now, the hour has stuck. Children stay up. The meal is long and unhurried and there is no rush to the pudding.
For a visitor this matters practically. On the 24th, shops and markets are frantic in the morning and shut by mid-afternoon; restaurants that open at all will do a single seating, usually a fixed and expensive menu, and they need booking weeks ahead. On the 25th a great many places stay closed entirely. Christmas and New Year on the islands covers the wider calendar, and the public holiday list tells you which days everything stops.
If you are self-catering, do your shopping on the 23rd. Canarian supermarkets on the morning of the 24th are a competitive sport, and the fish counter is the front line.
The main course
There is no single national dish the way there is a British turkey. Common choices, all of them with island form:
- Baked or salt-cured fish. Cherne is the prestige choice — the same fish that goes into sancocho — baked whole or served with a mild mojo. Sea bream and dentex appear too. The island fish are at their best in winter.
- Roast pork. A leg or shoulder, often marinated overnight in garlic, wine and paprika, which is essentially the same marinade that goes on rabbit the rest of the year.
- Roast lamb or kid. Common inland and on the drier islands, where goat is the default meat.
- Stuffed turkey or capon. A mainland import that has become widespread, usually stuffed with dried fruit, pine nuts and minced pork rather than sage and onion.
- Prawns and seafood to start, simply boiled and peeled at the table, with ham, island cheese and pickles.
Sides are Canarian: papas arrugadas with mojo, roast sweet potato, sometimes a potaje beforehand.
Truchas de batata: the Christmas "trout"
This is the island sweet that says December more than any other. A trucha is a small folded pasty of thin, faintly sweet dough, filled and either fried or baked and dusted with icing sugar. The classic Canarian filling is batata — sweet potato — mashed with sugar, lemon zest, cinnamon and often almond, sometimes with a spoonful of palm honey. A second common filling is cabello de ángel, "angel's hair", the stringy candied pulp of a particular squash.
The name is the puzzle worth carrying home. Trucha means trout, and there is no fish anywhere near it. The usual explanation is shape: the pastry is folded over into a half-moon and the edge is crimped, which gives it a curved, ridged back that early cooks thought looked like a small fish. There are no native freshwater trout in the Canaries at all, which makes the borrowed name faintly absurd and rather charming — an island pastry named after an animal most islanders had never seen.
Buy them from a bakery rather than a supermarket. Small panaderías start making them in late November and take orders by the dozen, and they are best within a day. They cost very little and they are the single most Canarian thing on the festive table.
Turrón, mazapán and the almond tradition
Almond nougat arrives in every Spanish home in December and the islands are no exception. The two classic mainland types are turrón de Jijona, soft and ground to a paste, and turrón de Alicante, hard and full of whole almonds. Both are imported, and both will be on the table.
The islands' own contribution is marzipan and almond sweets from the mountain villages where almond trees grow — the caldera country around Tejeda on Gran Canaria above all, where almond groves blossom in late January and February and the village bakeries turn out marzipan year-round. Bienmesabe, the almond-and-egg-yolk cream described with the island puddings, is a Christmas fixture as much as an everyday one.
Frangollo and the gofio at Christmas
Frangollo is a milk pudding made with coarse maize gofio, milk, sugar, lemon peel, cinnamon and raisins, cooked slowly until it sets, then finished with a thread of palm honey. It is the closest the islands have to a Christmas pudding, and it appears on Nochebuena tables particularly on La Palma and La Gomera. If you would like one thing on this list to try in a restaurant rather than a home, this is it.
What is drunk
Cava with the toast, red wine with the meal, and a great deal of ron miel afterwards — the honey rum comes out at the end of the evening and keeps coming out. Anís and brandy are traditional with the sweets. Children drink gofio in milk or the local fizzy drinks. The islands' drinks covers the range. On Nochevieja, the whole of Spain eats twelve grapes at the twelve strokes of midnight, one per chime, which is much harder than it sounds and is the source of a great deal of family hilarity; supermarkets sell tins of twelve peeled grapes for exactly this purpose.
Where the tradition is most visible
Christmas in the islands is an outdoor, public affair as much as a domestic one. Nativity scenes — belenes — are built on a scale that has to be seen, including sand sculptures on the beach at Las Canteras in some years, and the churches of La Laguna and Santa Cruz de La Palma compete over theirs. Teror on Gran Canaria, the island's pilgrimage town, has a Christmas market and is the best single place to buy truchas, chorizo and almond sweets in one morning.
Carol-singing here means parrandas: groups moving through the streets with timple, guitar, drum and chácaras, singing villancicos that are closer to folk song than to hymn. Canarian music and folklore explains the instruments. If you hear one coming, stand still and let it pass you.
Roscón de Reyes and the end of it
The festive season does not end on Boxing Day. On 6 January, Three Kings Day brings the roscón de Reyes: a large ring of soft, orange-scented brioche, decorated with candied fruit, often split and filled with cream. Two things are baked inside — a small figurine and a dried broad bean. Tradition says whoever finds the figure is crowned, and whoever gets the bean pays for the cake. Bakeries sell them from the 4th and sell out on the morning of the 6th.
If you are visiting in December
Book any Christmas Eve or New Year's Eve restaurant meal weeks in advance, expect a fixed menu at a fixed price, and do not assume anything is open on the 25th or 1st. Buy truchas from a small bakery, try frangollo once, and take a box of turrón home. Beyond the table, December on the islands sets out the weather and the crowds, and if you are still choosing dates, the best time to visit makes the case that Christmas here — low twenties, sea still swimmable, streets lit up — is one of the better trades in European travel.