Visitor numbers rocket as the Canaries find favour with holiday home buyers
- Bookings to the Canary Islands up 72% (Holiday Hypermarket)
- Foreign buyers account for 30% of sales in Canary Islands (Ministry of Development)
- Canary Islands are officially the sunniest place in Europe (Holiday Weather)
- 2 bed Tenerife apartment with pool just €54,500 (Kyero.com)
The Canaries are currently enjoying a bumper winter season. According to Trivago, hotel searches for Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, are up 95% compared with the previous year, earning the destination the fifth place on the company’s list of up and coming destinations for 2016. Meanwhile, Holiday Hypermarket has revealed that bookings for the Canary Islands as a whole have risen 72% year on year.
Just four and a half hours from the UK by plane, the Canaries offer a sun-kissed paradise for holidaymakers looking to escape the gloom of the UK weather. In fact, according to Holiday Weather, the Canary Islands are the sunniest and lightest part of Europe, enjoying 3,000 hours of sunshine and 4,800 of daylight per year. Perfect for beating those winter blues!
The clear blue skies and golden sands make the islands popular with second home buyers, but the Canaries’ idyllic setting is not just down to nature as Martin Dell, Director of Spanish property portal Kyero.com, explains,
“The Canaries are known for offering some of the clearest skies in the world, with thermal inversion and trade winds deterring cloud formation, but that’s not the only reason that visitors can enjoy such open blue skies. The Law for the Protection of the Astronomical Quality for the Conservatives of the Canary Islands Astrophysics Institute controls a number of factors, including light pollution and flight routes. The result is a huge expanse of deep blue sky, which is best enjoyed from the comfort of a sun lounger, with an ice cold drink in hand.”
Is a scenario that works well for UK holiday home buyers, who have for decades had a soft spot for the sun-drenched shores of the Canaries. While international buyers account for 18.41% of all property purchases in Spain as a whole, according to the Ministry of Development (Q3 2015), in the Canary Islands the figure rises to 29.77%.
Property prices in Santa Cruz de Tenerife rose by 7.56% in the year to October 2015, according to the Kyero.com portal, which lists more than 200,000 homes from 3,000 estate agents. In Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, the rise has been much more pronounced, shooting up by 26.09% over the course of the year.
A two bedroom apartment with pool in Gran Canaria will now set buyers back anything from €83,000. Though it’s still not a lot, particularly compared with the price of UK property, the increase in demand over the past year has certainly had an impact. Meanwhile an equivalent two bedroom apartment with pool in Tenerife can cost from as little as €54,500 – just shy of £40,000 based on the exchange rate at the time of writing.
Kyero.com’s Martin Dell comments,
“Both Gran Canaria and Tenerife offer excellent value for money. Tenerife has the edge at the moment, with prices there lagging a little behind Gran Canaria. Tenerife could make a great spot for holiday home buyers looking for a place in the sun that also has the potential to gain in value over the next year or two.”
For further details on properties to rent and buy across the Canary Islands and mainland Spain, visit www.kyero.com. For the latest data on the state of the Spanish property market, visit https://data.kyero.com.