Welcome to Gran Canaria
Surfing in Gran Canaria
Gran Canaria's surf is in its capital. Las Palmas sits on the north-east corner of the island, and its city beach, Las Canteras, runs about three kilometres along a promenade lined with cafés, with a natural rock bar a few hundred metres out that shelters most of it. The surf is at the two ends, where the bar stops.
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La Cícer is the southern end, and it is where the island learns. Sand, lefts and rights, any tide, and December is its month: sixteen clean days out of thirty, seven lost to the wind, seven too small. That is a better month than Famara gives Lanzarote, on a beach you can walk to from a hotel.
El Confital is the other end, a right over rock under the volcanic headland of La Isleta. Its best month is January, with twelve clean days out of thirty, and it is a wave for people who already surf well: shallow, fast, and full every time it works.
The season is the archipelago's, October to March, with the water never under 18°C. Summer here is flat on this coast and the schools work on whatever is left.
Welcome home.
Why Gran Canaria?
A week of surf that is also a week in a city
Most surf trips put you in a village that empties at nine. Las Palmas is a city of nearly four hundred thousand people, with an old quarter, Vegueta, and a promenade that eats late, so the twenty-two hours a day you are not surfing take care of themselves. The trade is the crowd: the beach belongs to the people who live there, and El Confital belongs to the people who surf it every day. Learn at La Cícer, watch El Confital from the rocks, and come back to it with a few winters behind you.
Where is Gran Canaria?
Getting there
Las Palmas is twenty-five minutes by road from Gran Canaria airport, which has direct flights from most of Europe. La Cícer and El Confital are at opposite ends of the same beach, a few minutes apart by car or a long walk along the promenade.
Best surf spots in Gran Canaria
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