You can now drive an electric car around the Canary Islands without much anxiety on Tenerife and Gran Canaria, with more planning on Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, and with real care on the western islands. Charging points have multiplied fast in recent years, but they are spread unevenly, and the islands have a particular problem that mainland Europe does not: mountains, everywhere, between you and the next charger.
The basics are the same as anywhere in Spain. Public charging uses the standard European connectors — Type 2 for alternating-current posts, CCS for rapid direct-current chargers — and almost all of it is operated through apps or RFID cards rather than by simply tapping a bank card. Prices are set per kilowatt-hour, usually with a higher rate for rapid charging, and are broadly comparable with mainland Spain.
Where the islands differ is density. An island is a closed system: nobody is driving through on the way to somewhere else, so the network was built for residents' daily journeys, which are short. That suits a visitor perfectly well for beach-and-town driving, and less well for the long scenic day out that is the main reason to hire a car here in the first place.
Who operates the chargers
The public network is a patchwork rather than a single brand. The large Spanish energy companies — Endesa and Iberdrola in particular — operate much of the rapid charging, and both run their own apps. Alongside them sit island council schemes, municipal posts installed by individual town halls, and chargers belonging to supermarkets, shopping centres and hotel groups.
Practically, this means one app is not enough. Most visitors end up with two or three accounts plus a roaming card, and the sensible approach is to register with the main operators before you fly rather than standing in a car park at nine at night trying to get a verification SMS while roaming. Some municipal posts are still free or nominally charged, a legacy of early adoption programmes; some require a local card you cannot realistically obtain as a visitor. Both situations exist within a few kilometres of each other.
Set up your charging apps, add a payment card and complete any identity verification while you still have home wifi. Doing it on holiday data with a Spanish phone number requirement in the way is where EV trips go wrong.
The apps that actually help
Two categories are worth having. First, the operator apps that let you start and pay for a session. Second, a crowd-sourced map that tells you whether a given post is real, working and occupied — Electromaps is widely used in Spain and has good Canarian coverage, and PlugShare serves the same purpose internationally. A route planner such as A Better Routeplanner will factor in the climbs, which matters here more than most places.
Read the recent comments, not just the map pin. A charger that has been out of service for four months will still show on the official map. On the smaller islands, one broken post can be the difference between a relaxed afternoon and a very slow crawl home.
Island by island, honestly
| Island | Realistic picture for a visitor |
|---|---|
| Tenerife | The best covered. Rapid chargers along the motorways and in the main towns, plus posts at shopping centres and many hotels. An EV is straightforward here. |
| Gran Canaria | Good along the east-coast motorway corridor and in Las Palmas and the southern resorts. Thinner in the mountainous interior and very thin on the west coast. |
| Lanzarote | Workable. Chargers in Arrecife, the airport area and the main resorts; little between them. The island is small enough that this matters less. |
| Fuerteventura | Long distances, sparse network. Charge in the towns and do not set off for Jandia on a quarter of a battery. |
| La Palma, La Gomera, El Hierro | Limited and concentrated in the main towns. Possible, but it needs genuine planning and a tolerance for uncertainty. |
None of this is static — the islands have been installing chargers steadily and the picture in two years' time will be better than the picture today. Check a live map for your dates rather than trusting any published summary, this one included.
Hotel and apartment charging
Overnight charging at your accommodation solves most of the problem, and a growing number of Canarian hotels have installed posts, particularly the larger resort properties and the newer builds. Some include it in the room rate, some charge per session, and some have exactly two posts for four hundred rooms.
Ask before you book, and ask specifically: how many chargers, what speed, whether they can be reserved, and whether there is a fee. A hotel that says "yes, we have EV charging" may mean a single slow post permanently occupied by a member of staff's car. If you are in a rented villa or apartment, ask the owner whether the property's supply can take a home charger or only a domestic socket; island electrical supplies in older rural houses can be modest.
The mountain factor
This is the genuinely Canarian part of EV driving, and it cuts both ways.
Going up is expensive. A run from sea level to the Teide national park climbs well over two thousand metres, and lifting a two-tonne car that far uses a substantial slice of a battery — far more than the same distance on the flat. Range estimates on the dashboard will fall much faster than the kilometres do, which is unnerving the first time it happens.
Coming down is where the electric car wins in a way no petrol car can. Regenerative braking on a long, steady descent from the high country can put a meaningful amount of charge back in — enough that drivers regularly arrive at the coast with more range showing than they had halfway up. It also spares the brakes entirely on descents where petrol cars routinely cook their pads, which is a real safety advantage on roads like the passes above Masca.
The practical implication: plan the climb, not the round trip. If you can reach the summit road with battery to spare, the return leg will look after itself. Judging the day on total distance alone will give you the wrong answer in both directions.
Why El Hierro is the interesting one
The smallest inhabited island is the one that matters most in this story. El Hierro runs the Gorona del Viento scheme, a combined wind farm and pumped-hydro plant that uses surplus wind to pump water into a volcanic crater above the village of Valverde and releases it through turbines when the wind drops. For extended stretches the island has run entirely on renewable electricity, and it set out years ago to become a fully self-sufficient, largely electrified island.
That gives charging an EV there a quality it does not have anywhere else: the electrons genuinely came from the wind blowing over the ridge above you. The charging network itself is still small, so this is not an argument for taking an EV to El Hierro on convenience grounds — but if you are curious about how an island actually decarbonises, it is the place where the question is being answered, alongside the desalination story told in where the islands' water comes from.
Hiring an electric car
The big international rental brands offer EVs at the main airports, and several Canarian firms have added them too. Rates are usually similar to or slightly above the equivalent petrol car, and the fuel-policy question is replaced by a charging policy: typically you collect it charged and return it charged, with a penalty if you do not, or you pay a flat fee for however much you use.
Read that clause carefully. "Return with the same charge" is fair; "return at 80 per cent or pay a recharging fee" is where the money is. The rest of the rental small print — deposits, waivers and add-ons — works exactly as it does for a petrol car, and is set out in car hire excess insurance and hiring a car in the Canaries.
So, does an EV hire car make sense?
It makes clear sense if you are staying on Tenerife or Gran Canaria, your hotel has a charger, and your driving is the usual mix of beaches, towns and one or two big days out. It is quiet, it is smooth on the hairpins, and the cost per kilometre is low.
It makes less sense on the western islands, on a touring holiday that changes base every night, or if the thought of a broken charger would spoil your afternoon. And it is worth being honest about the comparison: petrol here is exceptionally cheap thanks to the islands' low duty and low IGIC rate, so the running-cost saving that drives EV adoption in Britain is much smaller in the Canaries. You would be choosing an EV for the drive and the principle rather than the arithmetic.
Before you book
Check a live charging map for the island and the roads you actually plan to use, not the island as a whole. Register with the main operator apps at home. Confirm in writing what charging your accommodation has. Plan the climbs rather than the mileage, and leave yourself a margin on the smaller islands. Do that and an electric car here is a pleasure — the islands' roads were made for a quiet, torquey car, and arriving at a lava field or a mountain viewpoint in silence is a genuinely better experience than arriving in a straining diesel.