Four Canary Islands, one trip, by ferry

I dismissed the Canary Islands for years as nothing special, just some islands, and everyone I knew kept flying to the same one, which did not help. When we finally went, we broke the one rule everybody follows: we refused to pick an island. Four islands, one trip, linked by ferry.

It works because the islands sit close and the boats are frequent: finish a sunset on one island, eat breakfast on the next. And they are not variations on a theme. Every single landing genuinely felt like arriving in a new country.

Gran Canaria is the mountain road trip: mirador after mirador, cave villages, a slot canyon, dunes at sunset that pass for a desert. Fuerteventura is bare and windblown, all beaches and horizon, with a squirrel colony at an old colonial house as the comic relief. Lanzarote is Mars with a designer: smoking ground, vines growing in craters, a turquoise pool inside a lava tube. And Tenerife holds the trump card: Teide above the clouds, green Anaga mountains, and proper historic towns.

The rhythm is the real discovery. Ferries remove the airport tax on your energy, so sightseeing days can alternate with pool-and-beach days without wasting a morning on security lines. In two weeks we drove all four islands, swam on each one, and never once repeated a landscape.

So here is the verdict I owed the archipelago: not just some islands. Four different countries wearing one flag, a short-haul flight from home.

Both tested island-pair routes, with the ferry logic that links them, are in the guides.