La Palma is the best Canary Island for hiking, and it is not especially close. It has the densest network of marked trails, the greatest vertical range, the most varied vegetation and the two finest long day walks in the archipelago. La Gomera is the connoisseur's runner-up, Tenerife has the most spectacular single objective, and Gran Canaria is the best choice if you want to walk without hiring a car.
All four are genuinely good, which is the point worth making first. These are volcanic islands with 1,500 to 3,700 metres of relief packed into a day's drive, so you can start in banana plantations, walk through cloud forest and finish on bare pumice above the clouds. That vertical compression is what makes Canarian walking unusual: the scenery changes every 300 metres of ascent rather than every 20 kilometres of distance.
What varies between islands is how well the network is signed, how easy it is to get to a trailhead without a car, and whether the walking is an occasional highlight or the whole reason the island exists. Here is how they compare on each.
First, learn to read the paint
Spanish waymarking uses a single national system, and five minutes learning it saves a lot of confusion. Two horizontal stripes of paint on a rock or post tell you which class of path you are on:
- Red and white — GR. Gran Recorrido, a long-distance route, usually more than 50 kilometres and taking several days.
- Yellow and white — PR. Pequeño Recorrido, a day route, typically 10 to 40 kilometres.
- Green and white — SL. Sendero Local, a short local path, often under 10 kilometres.
Two parallel stripes mean carry straight on. A stripe bent into a right angle means turn that way. A cross of two stripes means you are going the wrong way — turn round. Each route also carries a code with the island's number: La Palma is 13, La Gomera 14, El Hierro 18, so a sign reading PR LP 13 is a day route on La Palma. Once you see it, the network becomes readable without a map, and the general picture of walking across the archipelago fills in the rest.
La Palma — the winner
La Palma is a walking island in the way that Chamonix is a climbing town. Around a thousand kilometres of marked paths on an island 45 kilometres long, almost all of it built on old stone caminos that linked villages before the roads came, and maintained to a standard that shames most of Europe.
The headline routes are two. The Ruta de los Volcanes runs the southern ridge over a line of craters, with the sea visible on both sides for most of a long day — roughly 18 kilometres with a serious descent at the end. The Caldera de Taburiente gives you the other kind of day: a walk into an eight-kilometre-wide erosion crater, past waterfalls and through pine forest, with 2,000-metre walls above you. Add the descent from Roque de los Muchachos, the laurel forest of Los Tilos, and two long-distance GRs that respectively circle the coast and run the island's spine, and there is a fortnight of walking here without repeating a step.
Season: excellent from October to May; summer is walkable but hot on the south ridge. Transport: the weak point — the bus network is thin and several trailheads need a car or a pre-booked taxi, though the island's walking taxis and shuttle services are used to the request. Scenery: the greenest and the most varied of the four. The routes themselves are set out in walking on La Palma.
La Gomera — the strongest runner-up
Small, steep and intensely rewarding. La Gomera's walking is built around descending from the central plateau down the radiating ravines to the sea, which gives you a consistent shape of day: start in the cloud forest at 1,000 metres, drop through terraces and palms, finish at a beach bar. It is hard on the knees and very easy on the spirit.
Garajonay National Park is the centrepiece, and the laurisilva here is the best-preserved anywhere — dripping, mossy, half-lit and completely unlike anything else in the Canaries. The island's network is compact and well signed, with routes that connect logically so that multi-day traverses work without a car.
Season: year-round; the plateau is cool and often damp even in August. Transport: better than La Palma's for walkers, because the bus routes run from San Sebastián to each valley and several classic descents finish at a bus stop, though frequencies are low. Scenery: narrower in range than La Palma — no high volcanic desert — but the forest and the ravines are exceptional. More detail in walking on La Gomera.
Tenerife — the biggest objective, the busiest paths
Tenerife has more terrain than any other island and the single most dramatic destination in the archipelago. The national park around Teide offers walking at 2,000 to 3,700 metres through a lunar landscape of lava and pumice, and it is genuinely unlike anywhere else in Europe. At the other end of the island, Anaga is a maze of knife-edge ridges and laurel forest with one of the highest concentrations of endemic species on the planet, and it is reachable by bus from Santa Cruz.
The catch is popularity and regulation. The famous routes — the Masca gorge, the Barranco del Infierno, the summit itself — all operate booking or permit systems with daily caps, and the summit in particular is not a walk-up. Anyone wanting to stand on the crater rim above the cable car's top station needs a free permit obtained well in advance from the national park, and the daily allocation goes months ahead in high season. Plan Tenerife rather than improvise it.
Season: the high park is best in spring and autumn, and can be snowbound or closed in winter storms. Transport: the best of the four — TITSA buses reach Teide, Anaga and the Teno villages, so a car is optional. How the bus network works is worth reading if you plan to walk without driving.
Gran Canaria — the easiest to organise
Often underrated, and the best choice for a first Canarian walking trip. Gran Canaria's interior is a ring of eroded peaks around a central massif, with Roque Nublo — an 80-metre monolith on a 1,800-metre plateau — as its symbol and its easiest great walk, reachable in half an hour from a roadside car park. The Barranco de Guayadeque, the Tamadaba pine forest and the long descent to the west coast give harder days.
The island's real advantage is logistics. The bus network genuinely reaches mountain villages, accommodation exists at altitude, and the trail network — restored around a system of old royal paths — is well signed and increasingly well linked. Its disadvantage is that the very best walking is concentrated in a smaller area than on La Palma, and the south of the island is dry, hot scrub for much of the year. Walking on Gran Canaria covers the routes.
Head to head
| La Palma | La Gomera | Tenerife | Gran Canaria | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Trail density | Outstanding | Very good | Good, spread out | Good |
| Waymarking | Excellent | Excellent | Good, permits on key routes | Good |
| Trailheads by bus | Poor | Moderate | Excellent | Good |
| Range of scenery | Widest | Forest and ravines | Most dramatic single sight | Varied, drier |
| Crowds on the classics | Low | Low | High | Moderate |
| Best months | Oct–May | All year | Apr–Jun, Sep–Nov | Oct–May |
Season, weather and the thing that catches people out
Canarian walking has a counter-intuitive seasonal shape: winter is the good season at low and middle altitudes, and summer is the difficult one. From June to September the coastal and southern routes are simply too hot to be pleasant before mid-morning, while the high ground is fine. Conversely, December to March brings snow and closures above 2,000 metres on Teide and occasionally on La Palma's summit road.
The trade-wind cloud layer matters too. On north-facing slopes between roughly 700 and 1,500 metres you will often walk inside cloud all day — atmospheric in the laurel forest, miserable if you came for views. Check which side of the island your route is on before you write off the weather. And the calima, the Saharan dust haze, can drop visibility to nothing and raise temperatures sharply with little warning.
Mountain rescue on these islands is busy, and the commonest call-outs are not dramatic. They are walkers who ran out of daylight on a descent, or who set off up a barranco in trainers. Dusk here arrives fast and there is no long northern twilight — allow an hour more than you think, and carry a head torch.
The verdict
Go to La Palma. Nowhere else in the Canaries combines that density of paths, that range of landscape and that lack of crowds, and no other island makes walking so obviously the main event. Hire a car, base yourself in two places rather than one, and give it a week — the choice of base makes a real difference on an island this steep.
Choose La Gomera instead if you want shorter days, want to walk without driving much, or are combining it with time on Tenerife. Choose Tenerife if Teide is the thing you actually want to stand on, and book the permit the moment you have dates. And choose Gran Canaria if it is your first walking trip here, if you want a mix of hiking and other things, or if you would rather not drive at all.