Our round-up of hotels in Gran Canaria features the best-rated properties our undercover inspectors have reviewed, from the hotel with the best views on the island, to the best resort for families.

Every year, we visit hundreds of hotels in the UK and abroad to bring you the most honest reviews you’ll find. We pay for our own stays, and visit anonymously, which means the hotel can’t influence our review in any way. And, unlike other reviewers, we’ll 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 hotels start at £133 per night – at peak times. 

We stayed at these hotels in 2024. Prices are for a Saturday night (peak price) and correct at the time of publication. 

Best historic hotel:

Santa Catalina, A Royal Hideaway Hotel, Las Palmas

Score: 4.5

Peak Price: £207. Check current rates at Booking.com

Everyone who’s anyone has stayed at the stylish Santa Catalina – it's not just the oldest hotel in Gran Canaria, but in the whole of the Canary Islands. Built by the British in 1890 when Las Palmas was an unofficial colony, its turrets and carved wooden balconies, set in its own palm-tree filled park, have attracted everyone from Winston Churchill to Agatha Christie. But this is no crumbling relic. Recent multi-million pound renovations have added a chic 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 with wicker sofa 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. Check current rates at Booking.com

The latest in a wave of smart new boutique hotels to arrive in Las Palmas, the Cordial 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, including patterned tile floors and the 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 hot-and-cold self-service affair, but for the excellent open sandwiches that appear intermittently with tasty toppings such as 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-per-night mark, the Cordial is a bargain.

Best views:

Parador de Cruz de Tejeda, Tejeda

Score: 3.5

Peak Price: £258. Check current rates at Booking.com

High above the clouds, in the rural centre of Gran Canaria, 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/café 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’).

Rooms: Expect dated decor with 70s ski-lodge-style wooden ceilings and beige furniture. Our bathroom needed upgrading too, with an unsatisfying lukewarm shower-over-bath arrangement. 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/café 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: £277. Check current rates at Booking.com

Set in botanical gardens wedged into the Mogan valley, with rust-red mountains rising on either side, the Cordial complex feels like its own little world. You could easily spend a week exploring its pools, restaurants, 450 species of tropical plant, 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: ‘Big, bright, but basic’ sums up the Cordial’s identikit rooms: tiled floors and stripy 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 room is so vast there’s a worry that when you hit the buffet, you’ll never find your table again. The selection is equally enormous. 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: £266. Check current rates at Booking.com

The Oasis bagged the best position in Maspalomas, with direct access to 6km of spectacular beach, by virtue of having got there first. Built in 1968 between the lighthouse and the iconic Dunes Nature Reserve, its construction heralded the beginning of Gran Canaria’s tourist boom. In 2019 it underwent a multimillion 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 five-star steel-and-glass resorts of the exclusive Meloneras strip next door.  

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 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.