Best Hikes in Gran Canaria:
Complete Trails Guide

The trail starts at the Degollada de la Goleta car park on the GC-600 and climbs gently through pine and almond trees before the basalt monolith comes into view — a sacred site for the island's pre-colonial Guanche population, and still the single image most people associate with Gran Canaria. The path itself is wide, well-maintained, and rarely steep enough to need hands; what catches people out is the final approach around the rock's base, where loose volcanic gravel and a couple of short, slightly exposed sections call for proper footwear rather than sandals.

We've done this one both at midday in August and just before sunrise in November, and the difference is night and day — literally. Sunrise means a headlamp, a jacket (it's genuinely cold at 1,800 metres before the sun is up), and roughly a third of the crowd. By 11am in summer, the car park is full and the light has gone flat for photos. On a clear winter morning, Tenerife's Mount Teide is visible above the cloud line to the west, which alone is worth the early start.

At 1,956 metres, this is the highest point on Gran Canaria, and the road takes you almost all the way there — a short, paved-then-gravel path from the parking area is all that separates you from a 360-degree summit view stretching to Tenerife, Fuerteventura and Lanzarote on an exceptionally clear day. There's no real hiking involved, which makes it the easiest "highest point in the Canaries" bragging right available anywhere in the archipelago.

The catch is the climate, not the climb: temperatures at the summit run noticeably colder and windier than the coast year-round, and winter occasionally brings frost or light snow dustings — unusual for most people's mental image of the Canary Islands. Bring a layer even if it's 26°C in Las Palmas when you leave.

Visible from Roque Nublo and often combined with it in a single day, Bentayga gets a fraction of the visitors despite a genuinely interesting site at its base: the Cueva del Rey, a complex of pre-colonial Guanche granary caves carved into the rock, plus what's believed to have been an astronomical observation point used to track solstices. The walk up is short and rocky underfoot rather than steep.

Pairing this with Roque Nublo works well logistically — both trailheads sit within a 15-minute drive of each other in the Tejeda municipality, and doing Bentayga second, once the morning crowd has thinned at Nublo, gives a noticeably calmer experience.

A 216-metre-deep volcanic crater, roughly 1,000 metres across, sitting almost absurdly close to both the airport and Las Palmas — this is the trail we send people to when they have a spare two hours and don't want to commit to a full mountain day. The Pico de Bandama viewpoint alone, a short walk from the car park, gives a dramatic crater view with almost no effort; the full rim loop adds genuine variety with banana plantations and golf course views on one side, raw volcanic rock on the other.

It's the rare Gran Canaria hike that genuinely works for young children and grandparents in the same group, and its proximity to the airport makes it a realistic option even on an arrival or departure day — a transfer that drops you nearby before a later flight works well if you're not renting a car for the whole trip. Shade is limited, so morning or late afternoon beats midday in summer.

This ravine between the municipalities of Ingenio and Agüimes is as much a cultural visit as a hike — people still live in some of the cave houses carved into the volcanic tuff walls, and a small archaeological museum near the trailhead explains the site's pre-colonial significance. The walk follows the ravine floor on a clear, mostly flat path lined with almond, fig and palm trees, genuinely pleasant rather than dramatic.

What we didn't expect on our first visit was the food: several cave restaurants along the route serve solid traditional Canarian cooking, which turns this into a half-day trip rather than just a trail. The lower stretch near the entrance is flat enough for a stroller; the path gets rockier and narrower the further you continue toward Montañón Negro.

Tamadaba Natural Park in the island's northwest is the largest surviving stand of Canarian pine on Gran Canaria, and walking through it feels like a different island entirely — the volcanic browns and golds of the central highlands give way to genuine forest, with the temperature dropping noticeably under the canopy. The Pico de Tamadaba viewpoint at the end of the main route delivers one of the best coastal panoramas on the island, looking down over Agaete and the cliffs of the northwest.

This is the trail to bring a proper layer for — the combination of altitude, shade and Atlantic cloud cover that often sits over this corner of the island makes it consistently cooler than anywhere else on this list, sometimes surprisingly so for visitors expecting Canary Islands warmth everywhere. If route-finding through the forest junctions feels daunting on a first visit, a guided hiking tour with local knowledge takes the guesswork out of it.

Near Telde on the east side of the island, this ravine is the closest Gran Canaria gets to a lush, waterfall-fed hike — but with a significant caveat: it's seasonal and rainfall-dependent. After a wet winter, the rock pools and small cascades along the route are genuinely beautiful and a popular spot to cool off mid-walk. In a dry spell or late summer, several of the pools reduce to a trickle or nothing at all.

The terrain involves some rock-hopping and stream crossings that get slippery when wet, so this isn't the trail for brand-new hiking boots or anyone uneasy on uneven, occasionally wet rock. Check recent rainfall before you commit a whole afternoon expecting waterfalls.

Starting from the village of Tasartico on the wild southwest coast, this is less a hike with a view than an endurance test with a spectacular payoff: one of the last genuinely untouched beaches in the Canary Islands, reachable by no road. The trail climbs and descends repeatedly across exposed, rocky terrain with essentially no shade for the full 2 to 2.5 hours each way.

We'd only recommend this to hikers who are honest with themselves about fitness and heat tolerance — it's not technically difficult in the sense of needing climbing skills, but the combination of distance, heat, and total exposure makes it considerably harder than the kilometres suggest on paper. For the full picture of what's waiting at the end, including swimming conditions and currents, see our Best Beaches in Gran Canaria guide.