What to Eat in Gran Canaria

Gran Canaria is the island where Canarian food is at its most varied, because the island itself changes every twenty minutes of driving. There is a real city with a real market culture, a green farming north that makes one of Spain's strangest cheeses, a mountain interior of rabbit and almond, a southern desert of resorts and a coastline of fishing villages that have been landing the same species for centuries. The island is sometimes called a continent in miniature, and the plate reflects it.

If you have one week and you eat three meals a day, four things belong on your list before anything else: the flower-curdled cheese of Guía, a plate of oven-baked kid or lamb from the mountains, an evening of tapas in the old town of Las Palmas, and a spoonful of bienmesabe from Tejeda. Everything else on this page is a bonus.

What follows is organised by where you will be, since almost none of it involves going far out of your way if you are already driving.

Queso de Flor de Guía: cheese set with a flower

In the north-west, around the towns of Guía, Gáldar and Moya, cheesemakers curdle sheep's milk using no animal rennet at all. Instead they use the dried flower of the wild cardoon thistle, soaked in water to release its enzymes. The result is queso de Flor de Guía, a soft-to-semi-soft cheese with a creamy, spreadable centre, a distinctly herbal, slightly bitter finish, and protected-origin status.

The detail almost nobody tells visitors is that it comes in three grades, and they taste markedly different. Flor is set with thistle flower only and is the most pungent and bitter. Media Flor uses a mix of flower and animal rennet and is milder, firmer and the easiest introduction. Plain Queso de Guía uses animal rennet alone and is a different cheese again, firmer and nuttier. Ask for the one you want by name at a market stall and you will be taken seriously. One practical consequence: only the pure Flor is suitable for vegetarians, since the other two contain animal rennet.

The cheeses of the wider archipelago — Majorero, smoked Palmero, the Lanzarote wheels — are set out on our page on Canarian cheese. Flor de Guía is the one you can only really get here.

The lamb and kid of the eastern hills

Head inland from the airport and the landscape turns immediately dry, rocky and full of goats. Agüimes, a beautifully restored old town on the eastern slope, is the base for this, and the eating happens above it in the Barranco de Guayadeque — a deep ravine of cave houses where several restaurants are dug straight into the rock face.

What they do there is roast meat: cordero (lamb) and cabrito or baifo (kid goat), cooked long in the oven with garlic, wine and herbs until the outside crisps and the rest gives way. It is served with potatoes and mojo and nothing much else. Eating it in a dining room hollowed out of volcanic rock, at a table cut into the wall, is a strange and very Canarian experience, and the ravine is worth the drive on its own for the cave dwellings and the walking. Book at weekends; local families fill these places.

An evening in Vegueta

Vegueta, the fifteenth-century core of Las Palmas, is the best eating district in the Canary Islands and it is not close. Narrow lanes of colonial houses behind the cathedral hold dozens of small bars, and the accepted way to use them is to move: one plate and one glass in each, standing up, then on to the next.

Thursday evening is traditionally the big tapas night in the quarter, when bars run small plates with a drink for a set price and the lanes fill with people doing the circuit. It is a local institution rather than a tourist event, participating bars and prices change from year to year, and it is worth asking at your accommodation what the current arrangement is rather than assuming. Either way, any evening after about nine will do.

Order carajacas at least once — strips of calf's liver marinated in garlic, paprika, vinegar and oregano, then fried and served in their sauce, sometimes in a bread roll. It is the defining Las Palmas bar dish, it is on almost every counter in Vegueta, and visitors walk past it because of the translation.

Bienmesabe and the almond country

High in the middle of the island, Tejeda sits among almond terraces below Roque Nublo, and it is the home of bienmesabe — a thick cream of ground almonds, sugar, egg yolk, lemon and cinnamon, whose name translates as "it tastes good to me". It is usually served over ice cream or with a spoon and no apology.

The village bakeries also sell marzipan, almond cakes and honey-sweet biscuits, and the almond trees flower in late January and February, which is the prettiest time to make the drive. It is the single best dessert stop in the archipelago, and the rest of the island's sweets — quesillo, frangollo, príncipe alberto — are covered in the guide to Canarian puddings.

The fish coast

Gran Canaria eats fish well on both coasts. In the north-west, Agaete and Puerto de las Nieves have a run of restaurants along the harbour where the catch comes in behind you, and this is one of the best places in the islands to eat vieja, the sweet-fleshed parrotfish that Canarians prize above everything. In the south, the quays at Arguineguín and Puerto Mogán still run working fleets alongside the tourist boats.

Expect fish priced by weight, served whole and grilled plain, with papas and mojo. The custom of asking what your fish will come to before it is cooked is entirely normal and nobody is offended by it — how to order fish in the Canaries covers the species names and the etiquette.

The coffee grown in a European valley

Behind Agaete, a steep green ravine called the Valle de Agaete runs inland, sheltered from the trade wind and warm all year, and farms there grow coffee. Arabica bushes are planted under the shade of orange, mango and banana trees on terraces cut into the valley side, and the crop is picked, dried and roasted on the spot. It is one of the very few places in Europe where coffee is commercially grown at all, the plantations are small, and the annual output would not keep a single city in espresso.

Several of the farms open to visitors for tours and tastings, which makes an unusual morning out combined with the harbour restaurants below. The coffee is expensive by any measure and mild and low in acidity to drink, and the honest verdict is that you are buying the oddity as much as the cup. The same valley grows citrus, mangoes and the small, sweet Canarian banana, which is a protected product in its own right and better than anything sold in a British supermarket.

Ropa vieja, potaje and the everyday menu

Away from the specialities, the daily eating on Gran Canaria is the island repertoire at its most reliable. Ropa vieja — shredded meat, chickpeas and fried potato — is a fixture, and the coastal villages do a version with octopus instead of meat that is better than the original. Rancho canario, the thick noodle-and-chickpea soup, is the island's own contribution to the family of Canarian pot dishes and is cooked in vast quantities at village fiestas.

The mountain villages of the interior do rabbit in salmorejo as well as anywhere in the archipelago — Artenara, Tejeda and the valley at Fataga being the obvious stops. And every bar does papas arrugadas, which the island considers a side dish rather than an attraction.

What to drink

Gran Canaria has its own small wine denomination, mostly reds from listán negro grown in the hills behind the north coast, and they are worth trying where they appear on a list. The island also distils: the Arehucas distillery at Arucas has been making rum from local cane since the nineteenth century and is one of the oldest working rum producers in Europe, which is why ron miel, honey rum, is everywhere here.

For coffee, ask for a cortado leche y leche — espresso with condensed milk and a little fresh milk, sweet and strong. Tenerife's barraquito adds liqueur and lemon; the island coffee habit explains the full range of what to ask for at a bar counter.

Where to eat it, practically

Most visitors stay in the south, in Maspalomas, Playa del Inglés or Meloneras, where the promenade restaurants are aimed at a British and Irish market and priced for it. Nothing is wrong with them, but the island's real food is between forty minutes and an hour and a half away by car in almost every direction.

A car makes this island; the interior roads are slow and spectacular. Without one, the Global bus network runs frequently along the coasts and into Las Palmas and less usefully into the mountains. Our pick of specific places to eat is in the island restaurant guide, and the day-trip options mostly pass a good lunch on the way.

The bottom line

Gran Canaria gives you more range than any other island in the group: a proper city to eat in, a protected cheese made with a flower, cave restaurants roasting kid in a ravine, and almond dessert from a mountain village, all within an hour of each other. It rewards a car, an appetite and a willingness to eat at Spanish times.

If you are island-hopping, the contrast is worth having — Tenerife runs on guachinches and wine, Fuerteventura on goat and cheese — and the island guide itself covers everything you will want to do between meals.