Two school calendars decide what a Canarian week costs you: the British and Irish one, which sets when flights and hotels are expensive, and the Canarian one, which sets when the beaches, the restaurants and the water parks are full of local families. They overlap in a few places and miss each other in others, and knowing where the gaps fall is worth several hundred pounds.
The counter-intuitive part, and the thing that surprises visitors who know mainland Spain, is that the Canaries are a winter destination first. Peak season here runs from roughly November to March, driven by northern Europeans escaping the cold. July and August are busy with mainland Spaniards but are not the price ceiling. The expensive weeks are the ones where a UK school holiday lands inside the winter-sun season.
So the short answer: avoid February half term, Easter, October half term and the fortnight around Christmas, and you will pay a great deal less for exactly the same weather.
The UK and Irish calendars, roughly
Dates are set locally and vary by year and by authority, so treat these as the usual pattern rather than gospel, and check your own school before booking anything.
| Break | England and Wales | Scotland | Ireland |
|---|---|---|---|
| Autumn half term | Last week of October | Mid-October, often a fortnight | Late October mid-term break |
| Christmas | Around two weeks from mid/late December | Similar, sometimes starting slightly earlier | Around two weeks |
| Spring half term | Mid-February | Mid-February, often longer | Mid-February mid-term break |
| Easter | Around two weeks, moving with Easter | Around two weeks, sometimes fixed to early April | Around two weeks |
| Summer half term | Late May, around the spring bank holiday | Usually none | Usually none |
| Summer | Late July to early September | Late June to mid-August | Late June/early July to end of August |
The Scottish summer is the useful anomaly. Scottish schools break up around the end of June and go back in mid-August, which means the last fortnight of August is term time in Scotland and holiday time in England — and the first fortnight of July is the reverse. Irish secondary schools finish earlier still, with exams pushing many families into an early June window that English schools cannot use.
The Canarian school year
Canarian schools follow a calendar set by the regional education department and published each spring for the following year. The shape is consistent:
- Term starts in the first half of September, a little later than in Britain.
- Christmas runs from just before 24 December to just after Three Kings on 6 January — a solid fortnight, with the emotional centre of the whole thing on the 5th and 6th rather than the 25th, as our page on Reyes explains.
- Carnival brings a short break of a few days in February or early March, running into Ash Wednesday. This is a genuinely Canarian feature and not something mainland Spain shares.
- Semana Santa gives around a week, moving with Easter.
- Summer begins around the third or fourth week of June and runs to September — longer than a British summer holiday by a fortnight at the front.
Add the island's own patron-saint day and two municipal holidays, all of which are days off school, and you get the full picture from our page on Canarian public holidays.
The February collision
Here is the single most expensive fortnight in the Canarian year, and the reason is a coincidence almost nobody plans for.
British and Irish schools take their spring half term in mid-February. Canarian schools take their carnival break at almost exactly the same time. And carnival itself — the largest one in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, with its Las Palmas rival running in parallel — draws hundreds of thousands of people to the two capitals and every mainland Spaniard who fancies it. Three separate waves of demand land on the same islands in the same week, in the middle of the winter-sun high season.
The result is that hotel rates in the capitals can double, flights are at their dearest, hire cars sell out and restaurant tables in Santa Cruz simply are not available. If you want carnival, it is worth every penny and you should book six months out. If you do not, February half term is the week to avoid above all others.
The week after half term, once both British and Canarian schools are back, is one of the quietest and best-value stretches of the entire winter — same weather, emptier beaches, and the carnival bunting still up in the villages, where the smaller celebrations often run later than the capitals'.
When the islands are busiest
Ranked roughly, and allowing for variation between islands:
- Christmas and New Year through to 6 January. Northern Europeans, returning Canarian emigrants and mainland families all at once. The most expensive fortnight of the year in the southern resorts.
- February half term and carnival, as above.
- Easter and Holy Week. Spanish domestic demand at its absolute peak, plus a UK school holiday, plus perfect weather.
- The October half term, when the winter-sun season is starting and the first British families arrive.
- August. Busy, hot and dominated by mainland Spanish families, but with less UK demand than you would expect — Britons are mostly in the Mediterranean in August.
- The December and May puentes, the Spanish long weekends that fill flights from Madrid and Barcelona without touching UK prices at all.
The cheap windows
Four of them, and they are genuinely good weeks rather than consolation prizes:
- Mid-January to early February. After Reyes, before half term. Reliable winter sun, low-twenties days, the quietest resorts of the whole winter and the sharpest package prices — the case our page on January in the islands makes in detail.
- Late April to mid-May. After Easter, before the Spanish bridge weekends. The islands are green after the winter rain, the walking is at its best and May is arguably the finest month here.
- Late September to mid-October. The sea is at its warmest of the entire year, Spanish schools have gone back and British ones have not yet broken up. If you have pre-school children, this is the week to take them — October before half term is the insider's month.
- The first week of December. Before the Spanish Constitution bridge and well before Christmas pricing starts. Cheap, mild and the Christmas lights are already going up.
The mechanics of when to actually press the button — how far ahead, and whether to wait for a late deal — are on our page about timing the booking, and the wider month-by-month comparison on the best time to visit.
Travelling in term time
The financial temptation is obvious, and in England the rules have tightened. A parent taking a child out of school without authorisation can be issued with a fixed penalty notice per parent per child, under a national framework that has applied since August 2024; the amounts and the circumstances are set out on gov.uk, and headteachers have limited discretion to authorise absence in exceptional circumstances — a family holiday is explicitly not one of them. Wales operates a similar system, Scotland and Northern Ireland handle unauthorised absence differently, and in Ireland schools must report cumulative absence to Tusla.
Check the current position on gov.uk or with your own school rather than on a forum, and weigh it honestly. The saving on a February week can be several hundred pounds; so can the penalty, and the relationship with the school is worth something too.
What a busy week actually feels like
Worth knowing that "peak season" in the Canaries is not the crush it implies. The resorts were built for volume, the beaches are long and the weather spreads people out across the year rather than concentrating them. Even in the first week of January, the south of Fuerteventura has room on the sand.
Where you will feel it is in the specific things everyone wants on the same day: the queue at Siam Park, a table at a well-reviewed restaurant, the Teide cable car, a hire car at the airport at four in the afternoon. Book those ahead in a school holiday and the week feels no different from a quiet one. Our guide to the islands with children and the list of the best family beaches are the places to start if that is the trip you are planning.
Before you book
Get your own school's dates first — they vary more than people expect, and neighbouring authorities often differ by a week, which occasionally lets you travel on the cheaper side of a boundary. Then check whether your week collides with carnival, Semana Santa or a Spanish bridge, because those move year to year and none of them appears in a British school calendar.
If you have any flexibility at all — pre-school children, grown-up children, no children — use it. The difference between the second week of February and the last week of January on the same flight to the same hotel is the sort of gap our page on doing the islands cheaply is built around, and the weather does not know which week you chose.