I will be on a three week tour of Morocco in November 2022. I am thinking of doing an independent visit to the Canary Islands before or after my tour. Suggestions on the following appreciated:
Best mode of transport from Morocco to the Canary Islands?
Which city in Morocco has the easiest route of transport?
Which island to choose for a 3 to 4 day stay?
Thank you, always the best advice on this forum.
What do you want to do in the Canaries? Tenerife and Gran Canaria are the busiest by far and more developed.
Fuerteventura and Lanzarote are more unusual - the landscape is like a lunar landscape and they are less developed. I spend time in October/November in Fuerteventura based near Lajares. I hire a car.
Your only option is to fly - there are few direct flights from Morocco - some are via Madrid. Where are you going to be based? For a short visit, you may want to consider direct flights only or flight times that aren’t very early or late - check out Skyscanner.
I did that almost 30 years ago(!). An awesome trip and a great, little known connection.
I flew from Laayoune, in the then-disputed (and somewhat still-disputed) disputed territory of Western Sahara (Western Sahara, formerly the Spanish colony of "Spanish Sahara", one of the last large European colonies on the continent). There was a large UN peacekeeping force in Laayoune at the time, monitoring a cease-fire between Morocco and the Polisario Front, local insurgents backed by Algeria who have been fighting a nasty low-level war for independence of their self-declared "Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic" (they are still working on that, but Morocco grabbed a large chunk of Western Sahara, including Laayoune, and have held onto it). Lots of soldiers with blue helmets, tanks, white airplanes with giant "UN" symbols painted on the side. I was nervous taking pictures of all the military gear at the airport but snuck a few shots.
My flight from Laayoune to Las Palmas on Gran Canaria was cheap (about $75), quick, easy, and transported me from a very edgy place to a very first-world EU one (the Canary islands, part of Spain, modern, no UN Peacekeepers). Looks like Royal Air Maroc still flies that route and -- incredibly, almost 30 years later, the price is still the same!
Getting all the way to Laayoune may not make sense for you (it was a long, freaky bus ride). You can also fly to the Canaries from Agadir or Marakech.
I visited several of the Canaries. I liked Fuerteventura (an island whose name literally means "strong wind" -- lots of windsurfers there!), but there are many islands, I'm sure most have things worth seeing/doing (I still want to go back), so you'll need to do some research on them to decide which align with your travel tastes. One could easily spent a long time in the Canaries (weeks), with just a few days, I'd pick just one.
Hope that helps. Have a great adventure. 😎
I visited Gran Canaria while on a cruise. It was great. Many of the sailors that sailed with Columbus and the early Spanish to the New World came from the Canary Islands.
The island was beautiful and had a lot of exotic plant life. It is worth a day or two for sure. Other islands to visit are Madeira and the Azores.
I've only ever been to Tenerife, and I loved it. Amazing variety of landscapes in a small area; easily filled a week!
Heard good things about Gran Canaria and Lanzarote too. Fuerteventura as well, but it does get annoyingly windy apparently. Other islands are more remote and do not make sense for a 3-4 day visit.
Fuerteventura can be breezy, but it keeps the temperature pleasant. I suggest that you look at YouTube and see what suits you as the 4 main islands are quite different.
You can see from the responses that people have different opinions - possibly based on the time of year that they travelled. I find Tenerife and Gran Canaria too busy, whilst others liked them.
The Canaries are an interesting blend of unspoiled rugged scenery and overdeveloped mass tourism. Remember that they consist of multiple, very different, islands. Some of the islands are quite large.
