What is CanaryMaps?
A map of the Canary Islands with the good bits marked on it. What is on it, what it costs, and what it deliberately does not do.
CanaryMaps is a map of the Canary Islands with the good bits marked on it. That is the whole idea, and everything below is just detail.
The problem it was built for
Planning a day out on these islands usually goes one of two ways.
You search, and you get the same fifteen places on every list, most of them written by somebody who has not been. Or you use a general map, which knows where the restaurants are but has no idea that the road you are looking at ends in a footpath, or that the pool at the bottom of it fills at low tide and disappears at high.
The information exists. It is just scattered across forum posts from 2014, a blog that has since gone offline, and the memory of somebody who lives there.
What we did instead
We went and found the places, and wrote down where they actually are.
Close to a thousand locations across the seven islands. Each one has coordinates for the spot itself, not the nearest car park or the village three kilometres away. Each has photographs so you can see what you are driving to. Each has a short description of what it is and how to reach it, and a tap that hands the coordinates to whichever maps app is already on your phone.
The twelve categories
Everything is sorted into twelve kinds of place: beaches, hidden beaches, viewpoints, natural pools, hiking, geology, culture and history, waterfalls, surfing, kitesurfing, sunsets, and abandoned places.
That sorting is the part people end up using most. You rarely want "anything". You want a swim that is not a resort, or somewhere to be at seven in the evening, or a walk that takes two hours rather than six. Filtering to that is the difference between a plan and a scroll.
How you get access
Make a free account and every island opens with ten locations on it, chosen to spread across the categories rather than sit in one corner. No card, no countdown, and it does not convert into anything.
If you want the rest of an island, you unlock that island: from €4.99 a month, less per island if you take several, with yearly and one-off lifetime options at the same step. It runs in a browser, so there is nothing to install and nothing to update.
What it deliberately does not do
It does not rank places. No scores, no "number one beach". A cove that is perfect in May with a light swell is a bad idea in January, and a walk somebody calls easy depends entirely on who is walking it. We describe; you decide.
It does not promise you a good day. We can tell you where a place is and what it is like. We cannot promise the weather, the light, or that nobody else had the same idea.
It does not pretend everything is easy. Some of these locations involve steep drops, loose ground, unmarked paths, tides that cut off the way back, and no phone signal. Where that is true, the location says so.
Why it asks you to agree to something
The first time you open the map you are asked to accept five short points: go at your own risk, leave places as you found them, respect wildlife and habitats, follow local law and the people who live here, and keep quiet places quiet.
That is there because a map like this can do harm if it is used carelessly. Plenty of these spots are quiet because they are hard to reach and nobody has bothered. Some sit on private land or at the end of a village street where people live. A few are genuinely dangerous. Pointing a few thousand people at them without saying so would be a poor way to treat both the places and the reader.
Who it is for
Anyone who would rather find the hidden cove than queue for the famous one, and who is happy to drive twenty minutes and walk fifteen to get there. If your ideal day is a sunbed and a bar within reach, this is probably not the map you need, and that is fine.
