Where houses cost less in the Canary Islands: the official figures

The official data stops at the province

When a client asks me where houses cost less in the Canary Islands, the first thing I tell them is that the question, the way an official statistic frames it, has no answer per island. The statistic on the appraised value of housing, which ISTAC publishes every quarter with the same figures as the Ministerio de Vivienda, goes down to the autonomous community and the two provinces: Las Palmas, which covers Gran Canaria, Fuerteventura and Lanzarote, and Santa Cruz de Tenerife, which covers Tenerife, La Palma, La Gomera and El Hierro. Here are the figures for the first quarter of 2026, in euros per square metre.

• Canary Islands: €2,233.7 per square metre.
• Province of Las Palmas (Gran Canaria, Fuerteventura, Lanzarote): €2,203.4 per square metre.
• Province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife (Tenerife, La Palma, La Gomera, El Hierro): €2,264.7 per square metre.
• Spain, for comparison: €2,315.7 per square metre.

Before going further, two things worth flagging for the whole page. First: this is an appraised value, the average square-metre value of open-market housing assessed by valuation companies during the reference quarter, not the price those houses actually sold for. Second: this is data for the first quarter of 2026, the latest published, and it changes every three months. Over the year the average Canarian value rose by 13.6%, but the two provinces moved differently: 11.5% in Las Palmas and 15.7% in Santa Cruz de Tenerife.

The nineteen Canarian towns, from cheapest to priciest

Below province level, the Ministerio publishes only one table: the average value per square metre for towns with more than 25,000 inhabitants. There are nineteen of these in the Canary Islands, and here they are, ranked by me from cheapest to priciest, with the island in brackets. Data for the first quarter of 2026, in euros per square metre.

• Ingenio (Gran Canaria): €1,431.8.
• Arucas (Gran Canaria): €1,627.7.
• Los Realejos (Tenerife): €1,768.7.
• La Orotava (Tenerife): €1,772.4.
• Santa Lucía de Tirajana (Gran Canaria): €1,773.3.
• Telde (Gran Canaria): €1,796.3.
• Agüimes (Gran Canaria): €1,936.7.
• Arrecife (Lanzarote): €1,946.7.
• Puerto del Rosario (Fuerteventura): €1,968.4.
• San Cristóbal de La Laguna (Tenerife): €2,016.2.
• Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Gran Canaria): €2,251.4.
• Santa Cruz de Tenerife (Tenerife): €2,335.1.
• Granadilla de Abona (Tenerife): €2,474.7.
• Candelaria (Tenerife): €2,831.9.
• Arona (Tenerife): €2,895.6.
• Puerto de la Cruz (Tenerife): €3,036.3.
• San Bartolomé de Tirajana (Gran Canaria): €3,138.9.
• La Oliva (Fuerteventura): €3,213.7.
• Adeje (Tenerife): €3,727.9.

Between the first and last row there's a ratio of 2.6 times: that's my own calculation, 3,727.9 divided by 1,431.8, done on the two values from the same table. Put in money terms, one square metre in Adeje costs what a good two and a half square metres cost in Ingenio.

Where prices are lower, seen by someone who lives here

The first rows tell one story, the same one I see whenever I take someone to view a property: where tourism doesn't reach, the square metre costs less. Ingenio, Arucas, Santa Lucía de Tirajana and Telde are the Gran Canaria that works, not the one on holiday; Los Realejos and La Orotava sit in the green north of Tenerife, a world away from the south.

At the other end of the list are the names anyone who knows the islands would expect: Adeje with its seafront of hotels, La Oliva which is Corralejo, San Bartolomé de Tirajana which is Maspalomas and Playa del Inglés. There the buyer isn't someone looking for a home to live in but someone looking for a holiday home, and they set the price. My advice to anyone on a tight budget who doesn't have to be right on the coast is to look at the first half of the list before giving up: those towns are twenty or thirty minutes' drive from the ones in the second half.

Why an average tells you little about the house you want to buy

Now the uncomfortable part. Each of those figures is the average of very few valuations: the Adeje row counts 148 for the whole quarter, Ingenio's 86, La Orotava's 80. Only Las Palmas de Gran Canaria reaches 1,089. With numbers like these, a handful of villas sold well or two apartments needing renovation can shift a town's average.

• Within the same town the difference is huge: in Arona, the seafront at Los Cristianos and the hilltop village of Arona itself are two different markets, and the table adds them together.
• North and south Tenerife don't sit on the same line: the table gives you La Orotava and Adeje, but doesn't tell you they're two climates, two types of buyer and two seasons.
• The table measures valuations, not sales: a valuation is almost always requested to get a mortgage, so it reflects the slice of the market bought with a bank's help.
• Houses without a valuation — a cash purchase, a sale between private individuals, the village house nobody appraises — don't appear in that figure at all.

The figures on this page are official quarterly averages: useful for getting a sense of the market, not for valuing a property. Your house is a single case, and its price is set by the floor, the view, the condition, the community fees and how quickly the seller needs to sell.

The islands missing from the tables

La Palma, La Gomera and El Hierro have no town above 25,000 inhabitants, so they don't have a single row in the municipal table. For them, the nearest public figure is the one for the province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, which is made up almost entirely of Tenerife: using it as if it were the price in Valverde or San Sebastián de La Gomera would be misleading, and I don't do it. Anyone looking there needs to work from real listings and completed sales, not an average.

I also looked for a figure per island in the ISTAC catalogue, searching it in full: it doesn't exist. On house values, the Canarian statistics institute stops at the provinces, just like the Ministerio. When someone shows you «the average price in Lanzarote», they've either taken it from a property portal — which measures what's asked, not what's paid — or worked it out themselves. If in doubt, ask which table it comes from.