Smoking is banned in every enclosed public space in the Canary Islands — bars, restaurants, shops, airports, buses, ferry saloons — but it remains legal on an open terrace, which is where most of it happens. Vaping is treated the same way in practice almost everywhere, and a growing number of Canarian beaches now ban both.
The governing law is Spanish rather than Canarian: Law 42/2010, the ley antitabaco, which in 2011 made Spain one of the stricter countries in Europe overnight. It covers all enclosed spaces open to the public, all workplaces, all public transport, and a handful of outdoor places where children are involved — school grounds, playgrounds and the grounds of hospitals and health centres.
For a visiting smoker the practical position is comfortable: you can smoke outside a bar, on almost any pavement, and in most hotel outdoor areas. For a non-smoker it is equally comfortable indoors, and slightly less so on the terrace where everyone actually sits in a climate like this one.
Where you may not smoke
- Anywhere indoors that the public can enter. No exceptions for a quiet back room, a private members' club or a late-night bar. Spain does not have the loopholes some countries kept.
- All public transport — buses, the Tenerife tram, taxis, ferry interiors, aircraft and the whole of every airport terminal, airside included. Ferries generally permit smoking on designated outside deck areas only; ask rather than assume, as our page on island ferries notes that operators differ.
- Children's playgrounds and their immediate surroundings.
- School and hospital grounds, not merely the buildings — the entire site, including the car park.
- Petrol stations, obviously, and increasingly the forecourt as a whole.
Enforcement is real but undramatic. Staff will ask you to put it out and almost everyone does. Fines exist under the national law and start at modest sums for an individual smoker, rising sharply for a business that tolerates it — which is why a bar owner will be firmer about it than a police officer.
Terraces: the current grey area
Under the 2010 law, an outdoor terrace is a smoking area provided it is genuinely outdoors — the usual test is that it is not enclosed on more than a couple of sides, so a fully walled-and-roofed "terrace" with plastic sheeting down for the wind is legally an indoor space and should be smoke-free. In the Canaries, where terraces are used year-round and the wind is a constant, that distinction gets blurred a great deal.
It is also the part of the law most likely to change. Spain has spent several years working on a comprehensive revision of its tobacco legislation, the declared aims of which include extending the smoking ban to hospitality terraces, banning smoking in cars carrying children, and putting vaping formally on the same footing as tobacco. The timetable has slipped more than once and the final scope has been argued over publicly, so do not assume either that it has come into force or that it has not. Check the position for your travel dates, and take the practical signal from the venue: if the ashtrays have gone from the terrace tables, the answer is no.
Regional governments can and do go further than national law. During the pandemic the Canaries were among the regions that required smokers to keep a distance from others outdoors, and several Canarian councils have since added their own local restrictions. The local ordinance always beats the general rule, and it will be on a sign.
Vaping
Treat vaping exactly as you would treat smoking and you will not go wrong. Spanish law restricts e-cigarettes in public administration buildings, schools, health facilities and public transport, and in practice the hospitality industry has extended the indoor ban to vaping voluntarily and almost universally. Walking into a Canarian bar with a vape and exhaling is likely to get you the same look and the same request as a cigarette would.
Devices and liquids sold in Spain follow EU product rules: nicotine strength capped at 20 mg/ml, bottles limited to 10 ml, tanks to 2 ml, child-resistant packaging and health warnings. Liquid bought in the UK may exceed those limits, which matters more for what you can carry than for what you can use. Disposable vapes have been under regulatory pressure across Europe, including proposals to ban them outright in Spain, so check the current position if you rely on them — and note that rechargeable devices go in hand luggage, never in the hold.
Availability is patchy compared with Britain. Specialist vape shops exist in the capitals and the larger resorts, but a village estanco may stock nothing at all and the coil for your particular device may be unfindable. Bring spares.
Hotels and apartments
Spanish law permits hotels to designate up to 30 per cent of their rooms as smoking rooms, properly separated and signed. Very few still bother. The overwhelming majority of Canarian hotels are entirely non-smoking indoors, with smoking allowed on the room balcony — which is, in this climate, the arrangement most guests want anyway.
Balcony rules vary and some properties have banned it there too, usually after complaints from the rooms above. Where it is allowed, use the ashtray rather than flicking over the rail. Smoking inside the room triggers a cleaning charge that is routinely in the low hundreds of euros, and hotels in the adults-only and higher-end segment are the strictest about it. All-inclusive resorts, where everyone spends the evening outside anyway, tend to be the most relaxed — the general picture is on our page about all-inclusive holidays. Holiday lets almost always ban smoking indoors outright, and the cleaning deposit is the enforcement mechanism.
Hire cars
Here is a difference worth knowing. In the UK it is a criminal offence to smoke in a car carrying anyone under 18. Spain has no equivalent national law at present, though bringing one in has been part of the proposed tobacco reform.
What does apply, universally, is the rental contract. Every hire company operating in the islands prohibits smoking in its vehicles, and every one of them charges a deep-cleaning fee if the car comes back smelling of it — typically a three-figure sum, deducted from the card on file with no negotiation. Vaping counts; it leaves a residue on the windscreen that valeters recognise instantly. If you smoke, do it outside the car at a viewpoint, which is a better way to see the island anyway. The other traps of renting here are on our page about hiring a car in the Canaries.
Smoke-free beaches
The fastest-moving part of all this. Spain's Ministry of Health runs a voluntary register of smoke-free beaches, and the number of Canarian municipalities signing up has grown steadily — several of the busiest resort beaches on Gran Canaria, Tenerife, Lanzarote and Fuerteventura now display the blue-and-white no-smoking signage at the entrances.
The status differs from beach to beach and sometimes from one end of a bay to the other, and some schemes are advisory while others are backed by a municipal by-law with a fine attached. Look for the sign where you come onto the sand, in the same place you check the safety flags described on our page about reading the beach flags. Where smoking is still allowed, take the butts away with you: cigarette ends are the single most collected item in Canarian beach clean-ups, and a filter in black volcanic sand is effectively permanent.
Buying tobacco here
Cigarettes and cigars are sold in estancos — licensed tobacconists, identifiable by a maroon sign with yellow lettering reading "Tabacos" — and from licensed machines inside bars, which require staff to unlock them. Supermarkets do not sell tobacco. Nor, legally, do the beach vendors and souvenir shops that sometimes offer it.
Prices are conspicuously low, because the islands levy their own tax rather than Spanish VAT and excise, as our explainer on the IGIC system sets out. That is also why the airport shops on a flight home are genuine duty-free rather than duty-paid, and why there are hard customs limits on what you may bring into the UK or onto the Spanish mainland — the numbers change and the only reliable source is HMRC's guidance on gov.uk, summarised on our page about allowances and what you can take home.
The cigars of La Palma
One Canarian tobacco story is worth knowing even if you never smoke. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries thousands of islanders emigrated to Cuba and Venezuela, and those who came back — the Indianos — brought the craft of hand-rolling cigars with them. La Palma grew its own tobacco in the Aridane valley and built a small, serious cigar industry on it, and puros palmeros are still rolled by hand in workshops around Breña Alta and Las Breñas today.
They have their own character, drier and lighter than a Havana, and are a genuine local speciality rather than a tourist product — you will see older men smoking them outside bars in Santa Cruz de La Palma and at the island's fiestas. Whether you buy one or not, it is a neat piece of Atlantic history: Cuban technique, Canarian leaf, carried home across the ocean by returning emigrants.
Before you go
If you smoke: indoors is out, terraces are fine for now, check the beach sign, never in the hire car, and buy at an estanco. If you vape: assume the same rules, bring your own liquid and spare coils, and keep the device in your hand luggage. If you do neither, the good news is that a Canarian bar interior is cleaner air than most British ones were fifteen years ago — the trade-off being the terrace, which is where everybody in the islands actually sits, described in more detail on our page about eating and drinking out here.