The canaries enjoy winter tourist boom

The Canaries' tourism industry is currently enjoying a hot winter. According to Trivago, hotel searches for Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, are up 95 per cent 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 per cent year on year.

Holiday home hunters have also been won over by the islands' sun-drenched shores; while international buyers account for 18.41 per cent of all property purchases in Spain as a whole, according to the Ministry of Development (Q3 2015), in the Canary Islands, that figure rises to 29.77 per cent.

As a result of the demand, property prices in Santa Cruz de Tenerife rose by 7.56 per cent in the year to October 2015, according to Kyero.com, 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 per cent over the course of the year.