Unesco declares Gran Canaria a Starlight Destination in recognition of the high quality of its skies for star gazing.

Gran Canaria has graduated with honours at the school of amazing night skies.  Unesco has declared the island a Starlight Destination, which certifies it as a privileged location for anyone who wishes to contemplate the stars and feel they can nearly touch them. Gran Canaria now joins a select club that includes Chile, New Zealand and Hawaii.

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.

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”.