i’ve spent 2 weeks at the beginning of March at Gran Canaria. below – list of the more interesting walking trails we’ve taken.
Maspalomas has pretty nice sandy dunes. it seems you can go across them however you like. the western part has more bushes, while eastern – just sand, sand, sand. the surface gets pretty hot during the day so it’s better to start a walk in the morning because around the noon going around barefoot will get painful.
once we got bored with the seaside [full of people] and the dunes – we took a half day trip to San Bartolomé de Tirajana. bus 18 has a stop here. San Bartolomé seems like a great starting point for longer mountain hikes. our route was pretty short: start, turning point, end:
La Aldea de San Nicolas de Tolentino turned out to be much better than i initially guessed from the map. it’s in a valley surrounded by hills, banana plantations, sheep and goat farms. on the day of arrival we took a hike towards hills on the east side. on the 2nd day of the stay there – to the coast and north – until this point. to avoid coming back over the same road we followed a dried out riverbed.
Galdar was next on the list of our destinations. we took a hike from it towards rocky shore, along the coast line and then – across banana plantations back to the city:
on another day we failed to find the right path up the hill near the city but nevertheless … we had a lot of walking between the coast line and hills south of the city:
we had our last accommodation booked in Las Palmas. the city made on me pretty good impression – much better than Maspalomas / Playa Ingles. And it was a good starting point for half day trips to smaller towns on the island.
on the first day we’ve discovered that the whole northern tip of Las Palmas is military area without entry, but there’s a nice path along the west coast – starting with sandy beaches and turning into higher and cliffs and rocks.
i think that the best day-trip we took was a walk from Telde to Tafira – crossing green valleys with avocado trees, climbing up on hills with views on fruit plantations, passing posh and mostly abandoned, at this time of the year, residential districts near Tafira:
during the whole trip openstreetmaps turned out to be again much better than google maps. i’ve even done some small contributions adding stairs or passages here and there.