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Blog Oficial de Turismo de Gran Canaria

Santa Catalina hotel

Santa Catalina hotel, the legend goes on

Restoration of the emblematic Santa Catalina hotel in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria is writing a new page in its history.

Gregory Peck took refuge there after playing Captain Ahab, shooting scenes from ‘Moby Dick’ on the Las Canteras beach, under the watchful eye of director John Huston. The hundred-year-old memories in its rooms also conjure up smoke from Winston Churchill’s cigars, echoes of the voice of the soprano Maria Callas, the smouldering gaze of Ava Gardner and the dreamy although somewhat distracted look of Agatha Christie, probably because a mystery novel was always brewing in her head, even while she relaxed by the Atlantic in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.


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Mogán

Gran Canaria, setting a course for the future in 2020

Gran Canaria is setting sail for 2020 with an offer that matches quantity with amazing quality.

Imagine a boat, the name Gran Canaria is painted on the hull. Close your eyes and feel the breeze on your face. This breeze makes the seagulls sway on the horizon and is gently blowing in the new year. This breeze also brings the winter migration birds, seeking the island’s warm embrace year after year. They appear and disappear as if by magic, although they always leave an invisible feeling of hope behind them.


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San Gregorio, Telde

San Gregorio, the tale continues

The neighbourhood of San Gregorio de Telde, in Gran Canaria, is an exciting blend of history, architecture, commerce and restaurants.

The sign on a small and inviting shop announcing the sale of both music and fishing gear in one synthesises the ability of the neighbourhood of San Gregorio in Telde, Gran Canaria, to surprise and excite. It is bustling with life, a place where a highly important heritage goes hand in hand with a great shopping area and a range of restaurant establishments, offering visitors an all-enveloping, and possibly unexpected, experience at this location to the southeast of the island.


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Valle de Agaete

Centuries of sunshine, coffee and wines

Finca La Laja reflects the generous and diverse landscape of Agaete Valley, in Gran Canaria.

High up, in Tamadaba Crag, the pine forest juts out, and the water oozing from the Stone shines like a mirror or a silver sheet under the sun. About one thousand metres below, at the foot of the ridge, in Finca La Laja, deep in the heart of Agaete Valley (Gran Canaria), Víctor Lugo Jorge, fifth generation of a family whose history intertwines with the roots of centenary trees, offers in his hands the fruits just harvested from the coffee plants that grow under the shade of orange trees and vines, escorted by a tropical garden of mangoes, avocados and guayabos.


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Mirador de Unamuno, Artenara

Artenara, from Here to Eternity

Artenara, located at Gran Canaria’s summit, keeps alive a unique tradition linked to the heart of the volcanic rock, of a purity hard to find in today’s day and age.

The artist Miró Mainou used to search the light looking for the truth. Maybe for this reason he settled in Artenara for over a decade, a village where life draws every day on a canvas of light and calm, the customary stage of a village nestled on the border of a colossal volcanic basin and the doors to Heaven. Here, Mainou’s brushes found the light, and here he won the Canary Islands Fine Arts Award, when he portrayed in lights and shadows the essence of the landscape, in paintings such as ‘Cumbre’ (‘Summit’). Nowadays, the mural painted by the students of Gran Canaria’s School of Art & Design recreates the piece on the façade of the house where the artist lived between 1977 and 1989.


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Cruz de Tejeda

Lessons in life at Cruz de Tejeda

Cruz de Tejeda, in Gran Canaria, is the geographical and historical centre, where the island’s inner voice is heard.

“You have to put a kind face to life”. Manuel Ortega was born in a family who used to farm the land and look after a small herd of sheep, some goats and one or two cows, while working at the water galleries in Gran Canaria’s high land. Maybe for this reason his conversation flows like a stream. “I enjoy talking to people” says Manuel while he strokes the back of his noble four-legged companion, Bartolo, an introvert and calm donkey whose job is to be ridden by anyone who wants to get to know Cruz de Tejeda’s surroundings, a crossroad and geographical, touristic, historical and even emotional epicentre of the island, located above one thousand five hundred metres of altitude, looming over an amazing volcanic basin.


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Valleseco

Time stops at Valleseco

Valleseco, in the green heart of Gran Canaria, wraps the visitor in a blanket of nature, tradition and flavours.

Valleseco wakes up at dawn and goes to sleep at night to the lulling sound of water. The washing pools, the remains of old mills, galleries and canals make a mirror where the town looks at itself every morning, reflecting a wide natural range of infinite shades of green.


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Risco Caído Interpretation Centre, Artenara

Gran Canaria opens a passageway to the past

The Interpretation Centre of Risco Caído and the Sacred Mountains of Gran Canaria Cultural Landscape highlights the values of this World Heritage site.

There was a time when the aborigines of Gran Canaria were able to create a bond between Heaven and Earth. It happened on the island’s highlands. Those people created a unique world with their own hands, involving the starts in the process. The most spectacular example of this dialogue between humans, the Sun and the Moon, happened eight centuries ago, in a cavity located at 1200 m of altitude, excavated in volcanic rock. The sunlight and the silver halo of the full moon magically came through the rectangular skylight designed for the purpose, giving light, in turns, to each one of the figures engraved on the walls of Risco Caído cave number six. But there was nothing magical about it, only observation, technique and belief.


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Faro de Arinaga

Faro de Arinaga: a Kingdom between the Land and the Sea

Faro de Arinaga (Arinaga Lighthouse), in Gran Canaria, crowns and watches over a coastal and inland space conforming a landscape of high natural value.

Getting to the foot of a lighthouse somehow feels like and adventure. This feeling is linked to the stories associated with these buildings, linked to the sea fare over the centuries, to captains and crews looking for the saving light in stormy nights, to lonely lighthouse keepers and beautiful, remote places. This halo, where imagination and reality become one, surrounds Arinaga lighthouse, in the coast of Agüimes, Gran Canaria, the lighthouse guiding these words today.


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