Surf Canaries Playa del Inglés

The camp

Danny and Annika opened Surf Canaries in 2007 on the beach at Playa del Inglés, right behind the Maspalomas dunes, and the school is still there. For the week it puts you up two minutes' walk from its door, in a low two-storey block curved around a pool that is heated in winter. The apartment has a twin bedroom, a sofa bed in the living room, a kitchenette and a balcony for coffee in the sun. Fresh bread turns up every morning and the cleaners come three times a week.

Lessons start around 9:30, moved earlier or later by the tide. A warm-up on the sand, some theory at the school pitched at your level, then the water until early afternoon, with no more than five students to an instructor. There are two groups: one for first-timers, one for people already catching waves. The teaching beach is the one under the dunes; when it has nothing, the van drives the group to another beach in the south, picked that morning for swell, wind and tide. Later days bring a surfskate session, then a lesson on how waves are made, and the video finally shows you what your feet are doing. The waves the island keeps for experienced surfers are elsewhere, in Las Palmas on the north coast. The south is the dry, sunny side, with water from 18 °C in winter to 23 °C at the end of summer.

With the school at the end of the street, you need no car all week: nothing to rent, no pick-up to wait for, and by half past one you are back, showered and by the pool. On the days the van goes elsewhere, it does the driving.

Surf Canaries is a school with beds, not a camp: no meals, no organised evenings, no shared table. The apartment is yours and so is the day. Playa del Inglés is the south's big resort, with somewhere to eat on every corner and the promenade above the dunes for the end of the day. Right for a family or three friends who want to learn in the morning, run their own afternoons, and would take the southern sun over the northern city.