Opening Hours & the Siesta

In a working Canarian town most small shops open around nine or ten, shut somewhere between half past one and two, and reopen around five until eight — while in the resorts almost everything stays open straight through from morning until late. Both patterns exist on the same island, often twenty minutes apart by car, and knowing which one you are in saves a wasted afternoon.

The midday closure is not laziness and it is not really about sleeping. It is a working day arranged around a long, proper lunch taken at home or in a bar, at a time when the sun is at its worst and nobody wants to be out. Spain calls the pause a siesta; what the shopkeeper is actually doing is eating, and then serving customers again until eight in the evening, long after a British high street has gone dark.

Two practical consequences for a visitor. Errands — banks, post office, the town hall, a proper butcher — must be done in the morning. And dinner is later than you think. Turn up at a good local restaurant at seven and you will either find it closed or be the only person in it.

The Canarian clock is not the Spanish clock

This is the detail that explains everything else, and almost no guide mentions it. Mainland Spain runs on Central European Time, an hour ahead of the sun's natural position for its longitude, because the country moved its clocks forward in 1940 to line up with Berlin and never moved them back. The Canaries did not follow: the archipelago stays on Western European Time, the same as the UK and Ireland, winter and summer.

So Canarian meal times look early compared with Madrid's. Lunch here is at two, not three. Dinner is at nine, not ten. Shops reopen at five, not six. The islands are not less Spanish about it — the sun is in the same place, the clock simply tells the truth here. For a British visitor this is convenient twice over: no time change on arrival, as our page on the Canarian time zone explains, and a national eating schedule shifted an hour closer to your own.

Typical hours, town by kind of town

Treat every one of those as typical rather than guaranteed. Individual businesses set their own hours, small places close when the owner has something else on, and rural restaurants sometimes take a weekday off that they have never got round to writing on the door. Ringing ahead is normal here and nobody finds it rude.

Where the midday break survives, and where it does not

The rule of thumb is altitude and distance from the sea. Inland villages keep the full closure, sometimes a long one. Working capitals like Las Palmas and Santa Cruz have largely abandoned it in the chain stores and department stores while the small independents still keep it. Resorts never had it — Puerto del Carmen, Playa del Inglés, Costa Adeje and the rest trade continuously because their customers are on holiday and do not stop at two.

The place it matters most is the day out inland. Drive up to a mountain village at half past two expecting lunch and a look round the shops and you will find shutters and an empty square, prettily lit and entirely closed. Drive up at half past twelve and it is a different town. Old university cities like La Laguna sit somewhere in between, with a lot open through the day and a noticeable lull all the same.

Sundays

Spain restricts Sunday trading, and by default the shops are shut. The exception is large: Canarian municipalities with heavy tourism are designated zonas de gran afluencia turística, and within those zones shops may open on Sundays and public holidays. In practice that means almost every resort and most of the seafront areas of the capitals trade normally on a Sunday, while the residential neighbourhood two streets inland does not.

Sunday is instead the day for lunch. Families eat out in numbers, restaurants that would be quiet on a Tuesday are full at two o'clock, and the good ones need booking. It is also market day in several places, and the Sunday market at Teguise on Lanzarote is the biggest of them. Everything else is closed, which is rather the point.

When Canarians actually eat

The daily rhythm, which is worth adopting for a week because it is better than yours:

• Breakfast, 07:30–10:00. Small and standing up: a café con leche or a barraquito, toast with tomato and olive oil, or a pastry. Our page on the Canarian breakfast has the full range.
• The second breakfast, around 11:00. The media mañana. Offices and building sites empty into the nearest bar for a coffee and a bocadillo, and for about twenty minutes the bar is the busiest place in town. It is the most reliably local moment of the Canarian day.
• Lunch, 13:30–15:30. The main meal. Three courses, bread, wine, and a menú del día at a price that still astonishes British visitors.
• Merienda, around 18:00. Coffee and something sweet, mainly for children and grandmothers, and absolutely for you if dinner is three hours away.
• Dinner, from 20:30, properly at 21:00. Lighter than lunch. Kitchens usually take last orders around 23:00, later at weekends.

Restaurants in resort areas serve dinner from seven for northern European guests, and the food is often perfectly good, but you will be eating in an empty room. Come back at nine and the same place has a queue. The wider etiquette of ordering, paying and the bread you did not ask for is on our guide to eating out in the islands.

Kitchen closed

The most common Canarian dining mistake is not turning up too early but turning up at half past four. Between about four and eight, most kitchens are shut. The bar is open, the terrace is busy, and you can have a drink, a coffee and a plate of olives, but you cannot have lunch.

The workarounds are worth knowing. Tapas bars and guachinches often serve through the afternoon. Bakeries and cafés will do you a sandwich. And in the resorts there is always somewhere. But if you have spent the morning on a mountain walk and come down ravenous at five, plan for it.

Banks, admin and the things that only happen in the morning

Spanish banks open on weekday mornings only, typically from about half past eight until two, and some branches restrict cashier services to an even narrower window. Town halls, post offices and public offices work the same way and often require an appointment booked online. If you need to do anything official — a residency query, a police report, a document — it happens before two o'clock on a weekday or it does not happen.

Cash machines work around the clock, and the practicalities of money, cards and charges are on our page about money in the islands. Pharmacies keep shop hours but always have one open on a rota, which our guide to pharmacies and the guardia system explains.

August, and other times things simply stop

Small family businesses close for holidays, and in the Canaries that tends to mean a fortnight at some point between June and September rather than the wholesale August shutdown of mainland Spain. A hand-written sign on the door saying cerrado por vacaciones is not unusual and rarely says when they are back.

Public holidays are the other interruption, and there are more of them here than in Britain because national, regional, island and municipal days all stack up — the full list is on our page about Canarian public holidays. On those days the Sunday rules apply, with the tourist zones open and everything else closed.

Working with it rather than against it

Do the practical things in the morning. Shop between five and eight, when the streets are at their liveliest and the light is beautiful. Eat lunch at two and dinner at nine. Treat the middle of the afternoon as the time to be at the beach, in the pool or asleep, which is what it is for at this latitude.

Do that for a few days and the hours stop being an obstacle. The shopping streets at half past seven on a warm evening, with whole families out and the shops still open, is one of the ordinary pleasures of the islands that visitors on a British timetable never see — one of several small habits gathered on our page of Canarian travel tips.