Green means swim, yellow means take care, red means stay out of the water — and purple, the one almost no British visitor recognises, means there is something in the sea you do not want to touch. The flags fly from the lifeguard tower at every supervised Canarian beach, they are changed through the day as conditions change, and they are the single most useful thing on the sand.
This matters more here than on a Mediterranean holiday. The Canaries face the open Atlantic. The same swell that makes the islands one of Europe's best surfing destinations makes some of their beaches genuinely dangerous, and the water can be calm at one end of an island and violent at the other on the same morning. A great many visitors arrive assuming a warm sea is a safe sea.
It usually is. The resort beaches of the south coasts are supervised, sheltered and fine for children. But the islands regularly appear at or near the top of Spain's regional drowning figures in the annual reports of the Spanish lifesaving federation, and that is not because the beaches are badly run. It is because of where the archipelago sits, and because of one particular hazard covered further down that has nothing to do with swimming at all.
The four flags
| Flag | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Green | Conditions suitable for bathing | Swim normally. It is not a guarantee of no current. |
| Yellow | Caution — bathe with care | Stay in shallow water, keep children within arm's reach, do not swim out. |
| Red | Bathing prohibited | Do not go in. Not to your knees, not "just for a photo". |
| Purple | Dangerous marine life or a water-quality problem | Keep out of the water and off the tideline. Usually flown alongside one of the other three. |
The colours are national Spanish practice, so they are the same here as in Málaga or Mallorca. What differs is how often the red one goes up.
What purple actually means
Purple — bandera morada — is the flag that gets ignored because nobody knows it. In Spanish beach regulation it signals the presence of dangerous marine species, or a problem with the water itself such as a discharge or an algal bloom. In the Canaries it almost always means the first of those, and specifically jellyfish.
The usual culprit is the Portuguese man o' war, the carabela portuguesa, which drifts in on the wind in loose fleets and whose sting is severe enough to need medical attention. It is not a true jellyfish, its tentacles trail metres behind the blue float, and a fragment washed up on the sand can still sting hours after the animal has died — which is why the purple flag means stay off the tideline as well as out of the sea. Do not let children collect the pretty blue balloons. Our page on jellyfish in Canarian waters goes through the species, the season and what to do if you are stung.
Purple is not the same as the Blue Flag you see on a pole near the promenade. That is an environmental award for facilities, water quality and management, and it says nothing at all about today's sea — our page on what a Blue Flag actually certifies explains the difference.
Red is not a suggestion
Lifeguards raise the red flag for a reason they can usually see and you usually cannot: a rip running off the sandbar, a surge breaking on the rocks at one end, an undertow on a steep-shelving beach. It goes up on perfectly sunny days with a sparkling sea, which is exactly when people ignore it.
Municipal by-laws in a number of Canarian towns allow fines for entering the water under a red flag, and the rules have been tightened in recent years across the archipelago. The amounts vary by municipality and it is not worth trying to find out yours. The stronger argument is simpler: if you get into trouble under a red flag, you have put the lifeguards in the water in conditions they had already judged unsafe.
Rip currents and how to get out of one
A rip is water escaping back out to sea through a gap in the breaking waves, and it is the thing that drowns strong swimmers. You can often spot one from the beach: a channel of darker, calmer, slightly churned water cutting through the white lines of surf, sometimes with foam or sand streaming seaward. It looks like the safest place to swim. It is the worst.
If you are caught in one:
- Do not swim against it. A rip can move faster than an Olympic swimmer and you will exhaust yourself in a minute.
- Float, and keep your head above water. Panic and gasping kill people long before tiredness does. Lean back, spread your arms, breathe.
- Swim parallel to the beach once you have your breathing under control, to get out of the narrow channel, then come in on the breaking waves.
- Raise one arm and shout if you cannot make progress. Lifeguards are watching for exactly that.
The RNLI's "Float to Live" advice works identically in the Atlantic off Fuerteventura and in the Atlantic off Cornwall, and it is worth teaching to children before the holiday rather than on the beach.
Which coasts are exposed
As a rule of thumb: south and south-west facing beaches are sheltered from both the trade wind and the dominant north-westerly swell. North and west facing beaches are not.
The calm, family end of the spectrum includes the long groomed bays of the southern resorts and the artificial or breakwatered beaches — the sort gathered on our list of the best beaches for families. At the other end sit the great wild beaches, which are spectacular and often barely swimmable: Famara under its cliff wall, Benijo and the black-sand coves of Anaga, and above all Cofete, which is fourteen kilometres of magnificent empty sand with no lifeguard, a fierce shore break and a notorious record. Go, walk, photograph, do not swim.
Surfers read the same coasts in reverse, which is why the best breaks and the worst swimming overlap so precisely — the point our page on surfing in the islands starts from.
The hazard that is not the beach at all
Here is the thing the flags cannot warn you about, and the reason the Canarian casualty figures look the way they do. A large share of coastal deaths in the islands involve people who were never swimming: fishermen on a rock ledge, photographers on a lava shelf, families walking a seafront promenade, visitors posing in front of the spray.
Atlantic swell arrives in sets, and a single wave much bigger than the ones before it can sweep across a ledge that has been dry for twenty minutes. Islanders call the phenomenon a maretazo, and the regional emergency service issues specific alerts for fenómenos costeros adversos — adverse coastal phenomena — separately from its wind and rain warnings. When one is in force, the promenades at places like Puerto de la Cruz and Bajamar are closed or cordoned, and people climb the barriers anyway.
Never turn your back on the Atlantic on a rock platform, never stand on a wet ledge — if it is wet, a wave has already reached it — and never let children play on the seaward side of a breakwater. This is the most under-appreciated danger on the islands.
Lifeguard hours, and the beaches with none
Supervision is a municipal responsibility, so hours differ from town to town and season to season. A typical resort beach is guarded through the middle of the day in summer, often from around ten or eleven until six or seven, with shorter hours in winter. Outside those hours the flags may be left up from earlier, or taken down entirely, and neither tells you anything reliable about the sea.
Most Canarian beaches are not supervised at all. That includes nearly every cove reached down a track, the wild north coasts, and many of the volcanic natural pools — which look like the safest swimming imaginable and are, until the tide turns and the swell starts breaking over the outer wall. Check the state of the sea on the outside of the pool before you get into the inside of it.
Practical habits worth adopting
- Look for the flag before you put the towel down, not after.
- Swim between the marker buoys where they exist, and within sight of the tower.
- Never swim alone on an unguarded beach, and never after a long lunch with wine.
- Watch the water for five minutes before the first swim of the holiday. You will learn more about the shore break than any sign will tell you.
- Keep small children in arm's reach even in ankle-deep water on a steep beach; the backwash on black sand is much stronger than it looks.
- Wear something on your feet in rocky entries — urchins are common, and the rock is sharp.
The bottom line
Canarian beaches are well run and the great majority of days are entirely uneventful. The four flags take ten seconds to learn, and knowing that purple means jellyfish rather than something decorative will one day save somebody in your group a very unpleasant afternoon.
Beyond that, respect the north coasts, stay off wet rock ledges, and remember that the sea here is the open Atlantic rather than a warm bay — our pages on what the water is actually like month by month and on staying safe across the islands fill in the rest. Then get in: on a green-flag morning at Las Canteras, with the reef holding the swell off, it is as good as swimming gets in Europe.