Things to do in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

Nature · Northern city, Guanarteme to La Cícer

A three-kilometre urban beach along the city's north-western face, sheltered for most of its length by La Barra reef.

Local tip: The beach is three different places. The Cícer end is a surf break with a young crowd, the middle is a flat lagoon behind the reef where families swim, and the Confital end is a rocky headland with a serious right-hand wave and no facilities. Walk to Confital at sunset — most residents never do.

Neighborhood · Southern old city

The original colonial town, laid out in 1478, with the Santa Ana cathedral, the Casa de Colón and the streets from which the Spanish conquest of the Americas was provisioned.

Local tip: Thursday evening is the ruta de tapas, when the bars around Plaza del Pilar Nuevo put out small plates for a couple of euros each and the whole city turns up. Go up the cathedral tower first — the lift is cheap and the roof view over the old town and the port is the best free thing in the city.

Food · Santa Catalina, near the port

A nineteenth-century iron market hall attributed to the Eiffel workshop tradition, now a dense cluster of food stalls and bars.

Local tip: Come for lunch on a weekday when it is full of port workers rather than at the weekend. The stalls that matter are the fish counters — order whatever came off the boat that morning with papas and mojo, and drink the local Tropical or Dorada rather than anything imported.

Nature · Tafira, 8 km inland and uphill

The largest botanical garden in Spain, built into a ravine, dedicated to the endemic flora of Macaronesia.

Local tip: It is free, it is enormous, and it is up in Tafira where the temperature is several degrees cooler than the coast — which is the real reason to go on a hot day. The dragon tree collection and the ravine paths at the bottom are where almost nobody walks.

Nature · Central Gran Canaria, about an hour by car

An eighty-metre volcanic monolith at 1,800 metres in the centre of the island, in a landscape UNESCO designated a biosphere reserve.

Local tip: Gran Canaria is often called a continent in miniature and the interior is the reason — pine forest, terraced villages and desert within an hour of the beach. Go early: cloud fills the caldera by mid-morning in summer, and the road up through Tejeda is slow, spectacular and not something to attempt tired.

Culture · Between Vegueta and the isthmus

The pedestrianised commercial spine of the historic city, with modernista shopfronts, the Pérez Galdós theatre and the writer's house museum.

Local tip: Walk Triana northwards and then cut east to the Parque San Telmo to see how abruptly the colonial city stops. The Casa-Museo Pérez Galdós is small, cheap and almost empty, and Galdós is the most important Spanish novelist after Cervantes — this is his house.