Blog Oficial de Turismo de Gran Canaria

Melenara Beach, in Gran Canaria, makes us feel like kings of the sea for at least a day.

Sculptor Luis Arencibia carries the sea in his piercing stare, as did poet Rafael Alberti. The Atlantic glint in his eye has an explanation and an origin. As a boy, the artist used to swim out to the point of volcanic rock that poked out over the sea on the south side of Melenara Beach, in Telde (Gran Canaria). Many years later, Arencibia would create a four metre high bronze sculpture of Neptune that still towers over the area to this day, and which allows the lord of the seas to look out over his kingdom from his watch tower.

San Agustín Beach, in Gran Canaria, is a place full of peace, light and magic.

San Agustín Beach is a child who is building sandcastles next to the water’s edge. His parents watch over him from where they have laid out their towels and stuck their sunshade into the ground, which flaps away like a flag right at the centre of the family’s private paradise.

Amadores Beach, in Gran Canaria, guarantees total tranquility in a place where a stretched out towel is a conquest of the good life.

Nobody does this nowadays, but there are chronicles out there that indicate that ancient inhabitants from this area on occasions used to go up to the top of the mountain of Amadores (that appeared on some old maps at ‘Llamadores’), at the top of Lechugal Ravine, to shout out to the fishermen. Today it is still possible to cast our eyes over the gentle bobbing of fishing boats as they come in and out of the coast of Mogán, the municipality in which the velvety beach of Amadores nestles invitingly, a beach where people now only speak quietly and whisper.

Gran Canaria has become the Canary Island to have the highest number of beaches with blue flags, with a total of 14 beaches currently holding this award.

Gran Canaria continues to wave the Blue Flag. The international jury has recognised this fact by awarding fourteen of the island’s beaches with this distinción, making it the island with the most blue flags in the archipielago. The awards are made by the European Foundation of Environmental Quality once they have analyzed a series of parametres including  water quality, environmental management, security and services, and information supplied to users.

Mogán’s beach and port, in Gran Canaria, make up a happy, almost amphibious spot, a place that time seems to have forgotten.

It has been this way for as long as we can remember. The fishermen and the sun follow the same clues to reach this point of coastline. One such clue is a rock that local fishermen have coined ‘pointy stone’, due to its peculiar shape, which has come to be a sculpture half way between the beach and Puerto de Mogán. Together they make up one of the essential spots to visit along the quite fascinating coastline of Gran Canaria. When you see the ‘pointy stone’, just stop for a moment, as if time itself seems to have stopped.

Surfer Pablo Solar tells the story of Soledad, a wave with its own name in Gran Canaria.

There are days in which national surfing trainer Pablo Solar, a four time Spanish champion and European Seniors champion, keeps his eye out for signs. The absence of any wind is one such sign. The other is the arrival on the coast of large northwesterly winds. When this occurs, Pablo Solar leaves dry land behind and heads off with his surfboard to El Paso, a coastal location in Moya, at the north of Gran Canaria, where these near magical conditions throw up his preferred wave, called Soledad.