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Best Gran Canaria Hotels
Fancy a seaside stay with ‘swim-up’ rooms or a luxurious mountain lodge with jaw-dropping valley views? Our undercover inspectors reveal the five best hotels they've reviewed
Gran Canaria doesn’t just offer near-permanent sunshine, it’s also great value year round.
Our round-up features the best-rated Gran Canaria hotels our undercover inspectors reviewed, from the best-value boutique hotel, to the best resort for families. We even stayed at the oldest hotel in the Canary Islands.
Every year, we visit hundreds of hotels, in the UK and abroad, to bring you the most honest reviews you’ll find. Unlike almost all other reviewers, we pay for our own stays, and visit anonymously, which means the hotel can’t influence our review in any way. It means we can tell you both the good and the bad bits of our stay - so you can really trust our assessment.
A good stay doesn’t necessarily mean expensive: prices for our best-rated Gran Canaria hotels start at £138 per night - at peak times.
We stayed at these hotels in 2024. We updated prices (for a Saturday night) in September 2025.
You can read the most recent reviews from our undercover inspectors, good and bad, in the latest edition of Which? Travel
Best historic hotel:
Santa Catalina, A Royal Hideaway Hotel, Las Palmas
Score: 4.5
Peak Price: £176
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The stylish Santa Catalina was built by the British in 1890 when Las Palmas was an unofficial colony. It’s not just the oldest hotel in Gran Canaria, it’s the oldest in the whole of the Canary Islands and its turrets and carved wooden balconies have attracted everyone from Winston Churchill to Agatha Christie. But this is no crumbling relic. Multi-million pound renovations have added a stylish rooftop pool and made its miles of marble gleam again.
Rooms: Our standard double leant into its colonial roots with a wooden ceiling fan, monogrammed pillows and elegant flock wallpaper, but the gold-framed mirror (that doubled as a smart TV), and inset rain shower brought it bang up to date. Our vast park-view balcony more than compensated for the lack of floor space inside.
Food and drink: Breakfast is quite the experience. Served on a shady terrace among fountains and chattering birds, there’s cava on ice, and an army of silent servers topping up your coffee. Every conceivable breakfast item is lavishly laid out in a long regal room, where counters groan with cakes and pastries, fruit, meats, cheeses, yoghurts - we even counted six different types of honey - and behind a bar, jamon iberico is sliced paper thin, to order.
Our verdict: The Santa Catalina offers elegance and a standard of service from a bygone age, at relatively reasonable prices.
Best value hotel:
Boutique Hotel Cordial Plaza de Mayor Santa Ana, Las Palmas
Score: 4.5
Peak Price: £133.
This smart boutique hotel could not have a better position. Overlooking the surprisingly sleepy main square, and Santa Ana Cathedral, it’s right in the heart of Vegueta - the cobbled aristocratic quarter where you’ll find the city’s main historic sights and a crop of buzzy new restaurants. Inside you’re met by friendly staff and extensive renovations that have retained many features of the former family mansion. Think patterned tile floors and a grand wooden staircase that now leads to a swanky rooftop bar.
Rooms: Book early because there are just 20 rooms across the hotel’s three floors. All feature high ceilings, huge windows and a stylish silver wallpaper aesthetic, rounded off by arty black-and-white photos of Vegueta. Our room had a glorious rain shower and a bed so comfortable we could have slept for days. Despite the central location there was no street noise.
Food and drink: The multi-level Belvedere rooftop bar, with its cathedral views, and colourful hillside backdrop is one of the best places in the city for a sundowner. Breakfast is a fairly standard self-service affair, but for the excellent open sandwiches that appear intermittently with tasty toppings like the local delicacy, chorizo de Teror.
Our verdict: With the perfect old town location, brand new facilities and rooms that often hover around the £100 a night mark, the Cordial is a bargain.
Best views:
Parador de Cruz de Tejeda, Tejeda
Score: 3.5
Peak Price: £167.
This luxury mountain lodge has the best views anywhere on the island. The restaurant, the infinity pool, and every single bedroom, are dominated by a jaw-dropping panorama of peaks and valleys forged by explosive eruptions over millions of years. Run by the Spanish government, the Parador was built in the 1940s to bring tourism to the island’s interior, but more recent renovations have added the fabulous glass-walled bar/cafe and vaulted spa. It’s just a shame there’s an extra €35 charge, on top of premium room rates, to enjoy the pool (as part of the ‘spa circuit’).
The Paradores chain of hotels is a Which? Recommended Provider. Check our reviews of the Best international hotel chains
Rooms: Expect dated decor with seventies ski lodge style wooden ceilings and beige furniture. Our bathroom needed upgrading too, with an unsatisfying luke-warm shower over the bath. But what the room lacked in style it made up for in abundant space, light and those views. Our room had huge wraparound windows, while others have balconies jutting out over the valley.
Food and drink: The enormous restaurant with its wagon-wheel chandeliers and spot-lit ceramics serves an ample buffet laden with local fruit and a cooked-to-order breakfast that includes tortilla and pisto de verduras (vegetable stew). But it’s the bar/cafe that steals the show, a glass box seemingly suspended in mid air, serving excellent roast pork sandwiches (€11) and sunset cocktails.
Our verdict: It’s a white-knuckle drive to get here, and the pool charge is a cheek, but this spectacular location should not be missed.
Best family resort:
Hotel Cordial Mogan Playa, Puerto de Mogan
Score: 3.5
Peak Price: £318.
The Cordial complex is its own little world, wedged into the Mogan Valley with rust-red mountains rising up on either side. You could easily spend a week exploring its pools, restaurants, botanical gardens, and endless activities - it even has its own archaeological park - without ever taking the five-minute walk into pretty Puerto de Mogan. Low-rise colonial-villa style blocks in salmon and sandy shades are embellished with domes and turrets, and at its heart is an impressive Centerparcs-esque lobby/bar with a stained-glass dome, rope walkways and waterfalls.
Rooms: The Cordial’s identikit rooms are big, bright and fairly basic with tiled floors and coral wallpaper decorated with cheerful blue and yellow paintings of flowers. At this price, it’s a bit disappointing. But our balcony, overlooking a pool and tropical trees made up for the instant coffee, and a shower head that had to be held to prevent it squirting directly at the wall.
Food and drink: The breakfast buffet is so vast, you may worry that you’ll never find your table again. There are 15 types of bread, every cheese you can imagine, and a 360 degree bar just for fruit, with various juices swirling in huge slushy machines. There’s even a selection of caviar.
Our verdict: An attractive and well-run resort occupying an enviable position in Gran Canaria’s best beach town.
Best beachfront hotel
Hotel Riu Palace Oasis, Maspalomas
Score: 3.5
Peak Price: £267.
Built in 1968 between the lighthouse and the iconic Dunes Nature Reserve, the construction of the Oasis heralded the beginning of Gran Canaria’s tourist boom. By getting there first, it bagged the best position in Maspalomas, with direct access to 6km of spectacular beach. And in 2019 it underwent a multi million pound renovation, leaving the impressive palm-filled gardens, but overhauling the pools and restaurants, adding ‘swim-up rooms’ - each with their own mini pool - and decking the bar and lobby out in sleek black and gold. Despite its concrete roots, it now blends seamlessly with the swanky 5-star steel and glass resorts of the exclusive Meloneras strip next door.
The Riu chain of hotels is a Which? Recommended Provider. Check our reviews of the Best international hotel chains
Rooms: Decked out in black, white and grey, with angular wood panelling, and patterned glass, the rooms feel fresh, modern and light. Our standard double had a marble tiled bathroom with his and hers sinks and a rainshower that had more than enough guts for the day’s sand and suncream. The best feature was its balcony, with superb sunset views over the lighthouse. But at these prices, we’d expect some complimentary drinking water in the room.
Food and drink: Breakfast is served among yet more marble, with huge gold chandeliers dangling overhead. The buffet displays perfectly presented cold meats, cheese, fruit and pastries, or you can visit the ‘show-cooking stations’ where, for your ideal omelette, or a freshly-made pancake, you just have to ask.
Our verdict: Excellent service and a spectacular location, but it won’t come cheap.
How we review hotels
Unlike all other national UK travel magazines and newspaper travel sections, Which? Travel never accepts freebies. We pay wherever we stay. All our hotel inspections take place anonymously.
We book a standard double room online, just as you would, and we sample the hotel’s facilities, just as you would. We never let on that we are from Which?
That means no special treatment, no reviewer upgrades and no opportunity for the hotel to influence our verdict.
And no matter how badly the hotel fares, we always publish the review, warts and all.
Our ratings
We use an overall star rating for the hotel based on what we think you should expect for the type of accommodation (B&B, luxury hotel etc) and price.
All our ratings strictly adhere to the following criteria:
- 0 stars – A dreadful hotel. We would not recommend staying here.
- 1 star – A sub-standard hotel we think is well below average in its category.
- 2 stars – An adequate hotel we think has room for improvement.
- 3 stars – A solid hotel that meets our expectations.
- 4 stars – An excellent hotel we think is above average in its category.
- 5 stars – An exceptional hotel we think is among the best of its type.