Are the Canaries now only Spain's fourth destination?

On the cumulative January-to-August 2026 figures, yes: behind Catalonia, the Balearics and Andalusia; in August even fifth. For the whole of 2025 they were third. INE, FRONTUR, provisional.

Why does the difference between annexes not match INE's percentage?

Because prior-year values are revised: annex against annex gives minus 0.451 per cent, INE prints minus 0.46 per cent. The INE figure is the one that counts.

Is this the same as airport passenger numbers?

No. FRONTUR counts arrivals of travellers not resident in Spain who stay at least one night; Aena counts passengers in both directions and includes domestic traffic. The two series are not comparable.

When will the figures be final?

INE writes on 2 October 2026: "Los datos publicados hoy son provisionales y serán revisados en marzo del próximo año" — provisional, with the revision in March 2027.

Andalusia overtakes Canaries by 823,496 arrivals

Q: Did the islands lose visitors to Andalusia?

There is no sign of it in the data. Andalusia gained over a million cumulative arrivals while the Canaries lost about 46,500 — one does not explain the other.

823,496 arrivals ahead: Andalusia overtakes the Canaries and pushes them into fourth place

Andalusia has overtaken the Canary Islands in international arrivals. Between January and August 2026 Spain's statistics institute INE counted 11,084,168 foreign tourists in Andalusia and 10,260,672 in the Canaries — cumulatively 823,496 arrivals ahead. The islands no longer appear in Friday's INE release, which lists the period's three leading destinations. What matters is how the gap opened: Andalusia grew 10.4 per cent, the Canaries fell 0.46 per cent. The islands did not lose a single visitor to Andalusia — they stand almost exactly where they stood a year ago. All figures are provisional.

2 October 2026 · By Martin Kosinski · 6 min.

The table: fourth place after eight months

INE names as the most visited regions of the first eight months "Cataluña (14,3 millones y un aumento del 3,9%), Illes Balears (11,8 millones y un incremento del 2,0%) y Andalucía (11,1 millones, un 10,4% más)". The Canaries are no longer in that sentence; in last year's annex the islands had 10,307,160 cumulative arrivals and were still 257,195 ahead of Andalusia.

The change of place is not a Canary defeat but an Andalusian surge: Andalusia added a little over a million cumulative arrivals while the Canaries lost roughly 46,500. INE gives no cause — the statistic counts, it does not explain.

The swing fits inside a single month

Four weeks ago the gap was a rounding error: at the January-to-July stage 1,301 arrivals separated the two regions. Then came August — Andalusia with 2,065,044 foreign tourists, 21.3 per cent more than in August 2025, the Canaries with 1,240,248, up 0.35 per cent.

That is less surprising than it sounds: August is high season in Andalusia and the Balearics, not in the Canaries. For the month INE puts the Balearics first with 21.2 per cent of all foreign tourists, ahead of Catalonia on 19.4 and Andalusia on 16.8 per cent; the Canaries took 10.1 per cent, by our calculation from table 3.

The counterweight: a season that has barely begun

An eight-month table is not the year for the Canaries: the island season runs from October to March, and those are precisely the months missing here. From September to December 2025 the Canaries received 5,384,284 foreign tourists against Andalusia's 4,416,206 — a difference we worked out ourselves from the December annex and the previous year's August annex. In December 2025 alone it was 1,447,097 arrivals in the Canaries against 687,807 in Andalusia and 194,922 in the Balearics. The islands earn their rank in winter.

Our full-year arithmetic: fourth place would hold in December

We ran the full year, and it should be said plainly: this is our arithmetic, not an INE forecast. Projecting the September-to-December 2025 arrivals forward at each region's eight-month rate, 2026 would close at around 15.62 million in the Canaries, 15.96 in Andalusia, 16.03 in the Balearics and 20.83 million in Catalonia. The Canaries would stay fourth. Spending and guest days are covered separately.

The actual 2025 close: Catalonia 20,055,316, Balearics 15,708,921, Canaries 15,691,444, Andalusia 14,466,171 — the islands were third in 2025, 17,477 arrivals behind the Balearics and over 1.2 million ahead of Andalusia. The projection assumes those rates repeat through the winter.

How government and industry read it: statements made before these figures

At the time of writing no quotable reaction from the Canary tourism authorities to today's August figures had been published. The earlier reading is on the record. The employers' association Exelcan expected, according to Moncloa.com of 16 September 2026, that "el archipiélago cerrará 2026 ligeramente por debajo del récord de 2025"; the report calls it "aterrizaje suave, no un frenazo", a soft landing rather than a braking.

The regional government frames the cooling in much the same way. On 22 January 2026 the tourism and employment minister, Jéssica de León, said that "el ritmo de crecimiento de plazas tras la pandemia era insostenible a largo plazo y ahora comienza una fase de consolidación y estabilización" — post-pandemic growth in bed places had been unsustainable, and consolidation was beginning. In a Canarias7 article of 26 September 2026 she moved the yardstick: "No preguntarnos solamente cuánto turismo queremos, sino cuánto valor queremos que genere." Both statements predate today's figures.