Gran Canaria: Time out from the Suntan by Neville Walker

When Francisco Franco Bahamonde left Gando Airport in Gran Canaria in a hired British De Havilland Rapide on 18 July 1936, he was on his way to Morocco to start a military rebellion. It became the Spanish Civil War, and brought him 40 years of power.

It’s hard to imagine many of the thousands who now pass through the airport every day having anything quite so ambitious in mind. Few islands are so synonymous with the package tour, and in few places is the visitor’s environment so artificial. The purpose-built resorts don’t have charming old quarters. And tour operators’ excursions mostly visit attractions that are just as artificial.

But if many visitors to Gran Canaria are hardly intrepid travellers, first impressions as you leave the airport must take some of the blame. Join the motorway and you’re confronted with a grim dusty plain; the island’s rainfall is usually anywhere but here, which means the greenery is elsewhere too – in the mountains. The plastic-covered tomato fields, slummy urbanizacions and out of town furniture stores don’t add much charm. Yes, there’s even a branch of Ikea.

All this may be a shame for the island’s image, but it’s great news if you’re not so easily deterred by first appearances. It is the paradox of Gran Canaria that, bursting with tourists though it supposedly is, many of its most beautiful and interesting sights can be enjoyed in virtual seclusion. And away from the resorts, the island hasn’t been homogenised.

A few miles from the McDonalds, Premiership football and English pubs of Playa del Ingles, people in the Barranco de Guayadeque still live in caves. Guayadeque is one of the most beautiful valleys on the island. It’s an easy half-day out from Playa del Ingles. But it’s another world. Here, a handful of people echo the lifestyle of the pre-Hispanic Canarians, the Guanches. Sometimes, conventional house fronts are built on to the cave mouths. Halfway up the valley, you can visit a tiny cave chapel at the roadside. At the very top, there is a cave restaurant, the Tagoror, where you can enjoy a decent Canarian lunch of potaje or papas arrugadas.

Gran Canaria lacks the punchline of a single, photogenic central mountain: it can’t compare with Tenerife in that respect. But it has its own drama: an up and down landscape that withholds views until the last minute and then hits you for six with them. In the hills south of Las Palmas, surrounded by posh suburbia, lies the Bandama golf course. If you leave the main road you drive past with it on your right. A few yards further on, there’s nothing but a gaping hole ahead of you; you’re staring into the 650 ft deep volcanic crater of the Caldera de Bandama. It must be the biggest bunker in the world.

You might decide to stop after the long climb out of San Nicolas de Tolentino in the west of the island, probably stuck behind a wheezing old lorry most of the way. Pulling into a lay-by, you might buy an ice cream, peer over the wall – and gawp at the immense cliff face of the west coast. The view is completely unexpected and ends in the Atlantic, hundreds of feet below.

But sudden vertigo is surely half the appeal of touring the island. You can drive from sea level to 6,500 feet – substantially higher than Ben Nevis – in less than half a day. The roads look hairy, but they are well surfaced and, off the motorway, not that busy. Hire a jeep and you can reach some of the most remote and peaceful parts of the interior on unpaved tracks. Only at weekends, when the locals get out and about, is it much busier.

Heading inland from the south coast resorts, the land rises in sudden lurches. With each lurch, the landscape, climate and vegetation change – from bare rock to succulents, to orange groves and date palms, then to orchards and almond blossom. Finally, you reach a pine-clad landscape more like Yosemite than an Atlantic island. It’s a surprisingly big country; you begin to understand why westerns were filmed here.

The summit of the island is at Pozo de las Nieves – its name means ‘the snow well’, and it is cold enough for a fleece to be advisable at this altitude. You can drive all the way. The road first allows you a breathtaking glimpse of the north coast. White dots lost in the blue haze above Las Palmas appear to be planes, until you realise they are ships out in the Atlantic. The road ends at a car park, over a mile high. From here, the views extend back to the dunes at Maspalomas, 20 miles away.

Gran Canaria is not merely an outpost of Spain. The architecture, fields of bananas and sugar cane, and the volcanic cones and craters everywhere remind you how far you are from Madrid. In some ways it feels closer to Latin America: at carnival in February, when the warm streets of Las Palmas fill with crowds dancing to salsa all night, the European winter seems far off.

Just like the island itself, Las Palmas doesn’t appear enticing at first. It isn’t quite the resort it once was. Your maiden aunt may have come here on her annual winter cruise in the fifties, but in recent years some of the hotels in the beachfront Canteras district have closed and been converted to other, less glamorous uses. The motorway along the harbour is hardly an attraction, and there are parts of town where it pays to keep a firm grip on your wallet.

But what remains is a surprisingly big city with a real metropolitan buzz. Chief among the attractions is the old colonial quarter of Vegueta. It’s perfect for a spot of genteel sightseeing, with streets and squares of traditional houses, some of them baroque and imposing. The facades hide balconied patios and lush gardens thick with the scent of orange blossom. The cathedral of Santa Ana is certainly worth a peek: baroque on the outside, it is austere and gothic on the inside, and has been here almost as long as the Spanish. At its back door is the house Columbus is said to have stayed in.

The biggest surprise in Vegueta is an 18th century town house in the Calle de los Balcones. Inside is the Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno. Like the Thyssen in Madrid, the classical shell hides an elegant modern space, a venue for contemporary art exhibitions including art inspired by the Canaries. If you pick your time you may enjoy it with only the staff for company.

It shows how easy it is to shake off the crowd when the crowd can’t be bothered. A little vertigo and a side helping of culture with your suntan are not going to strike your friends as intrepid travel. Gran Canaria is not that kind of place; there isn’t a Chatwin book in it. But it’s worth a thought, if you like to see more than the beach on your beach holiday.