Not Majorca, Crete or Corfu – the holiday island most popular with Brits
While the likes of Majorca, and Greece's Corfu, Crete and Santorini continue to draw millions each year, it is another European island entirely that claims the top spot as the favourite destination for Brits. This surge has been driven by year-round sunshine, diverse landscapes and high demand for holiday rentals.Tenerife has overtaken areas like the Costa Del Sol as the most searched location for property and holiday searches by British buyers and tourists. The Canary Islands, led by Tenerife, have recorded over 29 consecutive months with more than one million foreign visitors. In 2023, the archipelago received 16 million tourists, while Tenerife itself experienced its best tourism quarter in early 2025. In fact, this sector is now so substantial that Tenerife welcomes more visitors than the world's fifth-largest country.Statistics revealTenerife welcomes more visitors than Brazil, a remarkable feat given that the former covers just 0.02% of the latter's land area.According to the figures from the National Institute of Statistics (INE), nearly 1.6 million international tourists visited the Canary Islands in March 2025, an increase of 0.9% compared to the same month the previous year. The archipelago as a whole saw over 4.3 million visitors from across the globe, during the first quarter of the year – 2.1% more than the same period of 2024.In addition to the record-breaking visitor numbers, the island also hit a new tourism revenue record, with travellers spending over £5.83 billion in the first quarter, a 5.46% increase from 2024.In 2022, Tenerife topped the list of Spanish locations that British buyers were searching for at the start of the year, overtaking the Costa del Sol and ahead of Majorca in third, according to Rightmove data.However, while it highlights how well Tenerife's tourism industry is performing, it also raises questions about the impacts of mass tourism in certain areas, reinforced by the recent protests across the island. Over the past few years, residents of the Canary Islands have been protesting against the current tourism model that they say has priced them out of housing and forced them into precarious work.Demonstrators took to the streets across the seven main islands in May last year, as well as several places in mainland Spain and one in Berlin, Germany. A similar demonstration took place last April, in which thousands of people took to the streets of Tenerife, calling for the government to temporarily limit tourist arrivals to stem a boom in short-term holiday rentals and hotel construction that is driving up housing costs for locals.Protesters took increasingly extreme measures, with one group going on an "indefinite" hunger strike, but said the protests were not aimed at individual tourists but government officials.
