Canaries & Madeira Cruise

[Dueanamechange2025]

We have a cruise booked for the summer with stops in the three Canary Islands and Madeira.

Has anyone done these ports and got any suggestions for places to visit / excursions?

There doesn’t seem to be loads around the port areas. We like a mix of beach days and city days. Not usually venturing too far from the ship.

The day we are in Madeira it looks like there is a festival on so the cable cars are closed!

For Madeira - there's a HOHO tour bus, wine tasting, botanic gardens, you can get a local bus up to where they do the basket run thing down the hillside if that's still running (although it's quite a hairy ride compared to the cable car!)

The basket run in Madeira is ace and you can get the bus up there, would deffo recommend it!! I think from memory there's some nice botanical gardens at the top too

I'm really hoping we aren't on the same cruise*, as I can't find anything about a festival on the date I'm in Funchal... End of July?

*I'm looking forward to going on the cable car!

We are August, so hopefully you are ok!

I think both the basket runs and cable cars are off when we are there! Really gutted.

We did a similar cruise over new year, we did the cable car in Funchal which was great but the queue for the baskets back down was ridiculous so we didn’t wait (later heard from a fellow passenger that the queue was over 2 hours & they closed it).

We did a dolphin & whale watching rib boat ride from Funchal which was great, there’s also some sort of pirate ship you can go on a day trip which looked very pirates of the Caribbean.

Where are you stopping? Viator is useful to see what tours are available in each place, and whether they are cheaper than the cruise ship offering.

Our ports are Lisbon, Funchal, Lanzarote, Tenerife, Gran Canaria & Vigo.

Have you looked at this site, might be useful:

https://www.whatsinport.com/

Yes, we used that last year on our med cruise.

Was looking for any personal recommendations, especially for the Canaries stops.

In Lanzarote we went on a submarine trip that was fun - Submarine Safaris Lanzarote.

Tenerife we did Siam Park which was a lot of fun but imagine hotter than hell in August (and even busier!).

We booked all of our excursions through the cruise line as they weren’t hugely expensive, but if you’d rather book your own then the cruise ones will at least give you an idea of what might be around.

We did a day trip on a catamaran from Fuertaventura (appreciate you’re not stopping there) which we enjoyed, it included lunch, booze & a stop for swimming.

Submarine sounds good! Will look that one up.

The cruise line has just cancelled the Siam Park trip (we weren’t booked on but others on the sailing have posted about it on a Facebook page) so that makes me worry they know something we don’t about that day!

That’s weird that they’ve cancelled Siam Park. That’s one I wished we had done independently, as the coach back left about an hour or so earlier than we would have liked to leave. Although my youngest gets travel sick so public buses would probably have been her favourite option!

If by any chance you get a full day in Lanzarote, see if you can get an excursion to La Graciosa, which is the eighth inhabited Canary Island (a very handy pub quiz question, as most people think there are only 7). It's like going back 100 years in terms of the street layout of the little town where the boat docks.