Melenara Beach is a popular local beach with great seafood restaurants. It is far enough south to escape the cloud that often sits over the north east coast and is the best beach close to the large towns of Telde and Vecindario. Melenara gets no tourists because it's sand is brownish and there are no direct bus links to the resorts.

Las Palmas' low key El Confital is the opposite of the famous Las Canteras Beach just across the bay.

Twenty-five years ago Anfi beach and resort was a hillside by the sea. Then a Norwegian entrepreneur and billionaire called Björn Lyng went past on a boat and said, "I'm going to turn that into a huge resort with a Caribbean beach".

In the 1880s “three-year-olds drank as much coffee and wine as their parents” according to British writer Olivia Stone after a visit to the West coast of Gran Canaria. By then the locals had been growing their own for 100 years from plants imported from South America via Tenerife.