Paradores & Historic Hotels

A parador is a state-owned hotel, run by the Spanish government's own hotel company, and the Canaries have four of them — on La Gomera, on El Hierro, high in the mountains of Gran Canaria and inside the crater of Teide. All four are in places a commercial chain would never have built: the point of the network has always been to put a comfortable bed somewhere that deserves one, rather than somewhere that makes money.

The chain, Paradores de Turismo, dates to 1928, when the Spanish state started converting castles, monasteries and palaces into hotels to open up parts of the country with no tourist infrastructure at all. Roughly a hundred of them exist across Spain today. Some occupy genuinely ancient buildings; others, including three of the four in the Canaries, are purpose-built in a regional style on a site chosen for the view.

That distinction matters when you book. A Canarian parador is not a medieval castle. It is a handsome, slightly formal, mid-century hotel in an extraordinary position, with a restaurant that takes local cooking seriously and a lounge full of dark wood and Canarian tile. Expect four-star comfort rather than boutique design, and expect the location to do most of the work.

Parador de La Gomera — the one people come back for

The best of the four, and the one worth planning a trip around. It sits on the headland above San Sebastián de La Gomera, built as a Canarian manor house around courtyards, with a garden of dragon trees and hibiscus and a swimming pool looking straight across the water at the cone of Teide. Walk down into town in fifteen minutes; walk back up in rather more.

The Columbus connection is worked hard here, and fairly: San Sebastián was the last port the 1492 expedition touched before the Atlantic crossing, and the parador's decoration nods to it constantly. If that history interests you, what actually happened during that stop is more interesting than the gift shop version. The hotel makes a fine base for the island as a whole, though walkers usually prefer to be nearer the forest — the options are set out in where to base yourself on La Gomera.

Parador de El Hierro — the quiet one

El Hierro's parador stands alone on the shingle bay of Las Playas, on the island's wild eastern shore beneath a wall of cliff, with the rock pillar of the Roque de la Bonanza offshore. There is nothing else there. No village, no shop, no passing traffic. For a certain kind of guest that is the entire appeal, and for another kind it is an alarming discovery made at nine in the evening.

The swimming is rocky rather than sandy and the sea on that coast can be serious. What the location buys you is silence and a genuinely dark sky. The island's other bases, including the capital and the diving village in the south, are compared in choosing your corner of El Hierro.

Parador de Cruz de Tejeda — the mountain one

Gran Canaria's parador sits at the pass of Cruz de Tejeda, around 1,500 metres up in the centre of the island, where the roads from every direction meet. From the terrace you look down into the crater basin at Roque Nublo and the monolith of Roque Bentayga — the view Unamuno was describing when he called the interior of Gran Canaria a petrified storm. It has a spa, and it is the only proper hotel at that altitude on the island.

Be clear-eyed about two things. Coach parties stop here for lunch, so the middle of the day is busy; by six in the evening they have gone and the place transforms. And it is cold. Fifteen degrees and cloud at the pass while the coast bakes is completely normal, which is exactly why the village of Tejeda below is full of almond blossom in February.

Parador de Las Cañadas del Teide — sleeping above the clouds

This is the one with the unique selling point that no money can replicate: it is the only hotel inside Teide National Park, at roughly 2,150 metres in the caldera, surrounded by lava fields and the rock formations of the Roques de García. Everyone else in the park at night has either driven up specially or is on an organised tour.

What that buys you is the sky. Being already at altitude when darkness falls, with no drive home, is the difference between glancing at the stars and actually watching them — the practical side of which is covered in stargazing on the islands. It also buys you a head start on the summit: the cable car queue is a twenty-minute drive rather than an hour and a half up from the coast.

The trick that makes a parador affordable

Paradores publishes rack rates that look steep, and then discounts hard through its own programmes. The chain has run an over-55s scheme and a loyalty card with points and member rates for many years, and it periodically releases cut-price blocks in shoulder season. Booking through the chain's own website rather than a third-party platform is the only way to reach any of it, because the schemes are tied to an account.

The other trick is the restaurant. Paradores have a standing policy of cooking regional food, and in the Canaries that means a menu with sancocho, cabrito and local cheeses at prices that undercut a comparable hotel restaurant on the coast. You do not need to be a guest to eat in one. Lunch at Cruz de Tejeda with that view is one of the better-value tables on Gran Canaria.

Typical cost bands in 2026

These are the ranges people report rather than fixed prices; the spread between a wet Tuesday in May and the week between Christmas and New Year is enormous.

The grand old hotels that came first

Paradores are a state project. The islands' other historic hotels came from something quite different: the Victorian and Edwardian habit of sending the tubercular and the bronchial south for the winter. British doctors prescribed the Canaries, British money built the hotels, and Puerto de la Cruz became a health resort decades before anyone thought of a package holiday. The whole story sits in the British and the Canary Islands.

The Gran Hotel Taoro, opened in 1890 above Puerto de la Cruz, was the grandest of them — for a while the largest hotel in Spain, later a casino, and then closed for many years while restoration schemes came and went. Its gardens and the surrounding park are open and worth the walk up for the view alone, but check the hotel's current status before you plan a night there, because it has changed hands and purpose more than once.

In Las Palmas, the Hotel Santa Catalina has better luck. Also dating from 1890 and rebuilt in the 1950s in a Canarian colonial style, it stands in the Doramas gardens next to Pueblo Canario and has hosted most of the twentieth century's passing celebrities. It reopened after a full restoration as a luxury hotel and remains the city's grande dame. Santa Cruz de Tenerife has its own equivalent in the Mencey, opened in 1950 and still the address the island's establishment uses for weddings.

Convents, manors and the small heritage places

Below the famous names there is a quiet layer of small historic hotels that are often better value and more characterful than either category above. Old merchants' houses in the colonial streets of Santa Cruz de La Palma and La Laguna have been converted into eight- and twelve-room hotels with inner courtyards, carved balconies and a single tree in the middle. Several occupy former convents. These are where you sleep inside real history rather than a state tribute to it, and they tend to sit within walking distance of everything, which none of the paradores do.

Booking, and who this suits

Paradores fill fastest in Easter week, August and the Christmas fortnight, and La Gomera and Teide sell out earliest. Book those two several months ahead. Cruz de Tejeda and El Hierro are usually available closer in. All four allow a one-night stay, which makes them useful as a splurge in the middle of a self-catering trip rather than a whole holiday.

This is the right kind of hotel if what you want from a room is a window. It is the wrong kind if you want a beach outside the door, a lively evening, or children's entertainment, because none of the four offers any of those. Used well — a night in the crater, a night above San Sebastián, the rest of the week somewhere cheaper — the paradores give you the two or three views you will still be describing to people a year later.