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Blog Oficial de Turismo de Gran Canaria

Plaza del Pilar Nuevo, Vegueta, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

Artistic streets in Vegueta, the old town of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

In the capital's neighbourhood, we find streets linked to the memory of Saint-Saëns, Alfredo Kraus, Luján Pérez, Pérez Galdós and Néstor Álamo.

There are walks that take us to places where art was born or where the memory of someone who sowed beauty remains. The neighbourhood of Vegueta, in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, has art, beauty and history throughout its streets, museums, cathedral and churches. But it also has secluded streets where, if we pay attention, we can almost recognise the presence of those who once walked on its cobblestones and pavements.


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Carnival "comparsa" dancing troupe. Las Canteras Avenue

Gran Canaria, Carnival is back home again

The spirit of the Carnival possesses a thousand different faces in Gran Canaria and reflects hundreds of years of tradition.

Ana lives in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Ever year she improvises with a couple of different fancy dress costumes, while there is one fancy dress that she uses year after year for carnival. She goes outdoors in the middle of the fiestas in her pyjamas, a pair of slippers, a worn-out but adorable blue-coloured teddy bear, and a mug with a camomile tea bag hanging on a thread. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is what shapes the unbreakable spirit of the carnival, which, on the island of Gran Canaria, is a particularly lively and rowdy affair.


Faro de Maspalomas

Your own personal palm tree

The Canarian palm tree forms part of the landscape and identity of Gran Canaria, and will linger in your mind following your stay

They have always been around, rustling in the breeze, providing shade, breaking up blue skies with their slim shadows. A group of them even led to the name of the island’s capital city, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, over five centuries ago now. Poet Bartolomé Cairasco de Figueroa (1583-1610) used to say that they were “so, so tall, much taller than the Pyramids in Egypt”, while the chronicals of the Conquest referred to the island “being just like a garden, covered with palm trees”.


The Alfredo Kraus Auditorium, Las Canteras beach

The voice of the ocean

The Alfredo Kraus Auditorium triumphs as an icon in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria for how it fits in with its surroundings. 

As a boy, Juan Bordes described the existence of some little caboso fish that inhabited the pools left at low tide by Las Canteras beach. Juan then grew up, became a man and a famous sculptor, but those little fish continued to swim around in his mind, the very place from where they came out to become the sculptural series set into the Alfredo Kraus Auditorium in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. The mermaids on the façade are inspired by those early salty memories.


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