2. June 2025
Home » Travel » Travel Reviews » Places & Sights » Aviation Monuments on Gran Canaria (Pictured Story)
Places & Sights

Aviation Monuments on Gran Canaria (Pictured Story)

Florian Buechtingby Florian Buechting

The Canary Islands have not only been a key hub for maritime travels (Gran Canaria has, for example, been a stop on Columbus’ travels to America), but also have a certain importance for the history of aviation. During my trip to Gran Canaria, I visited three aviation memorials, which come with very different stories – good and bad. Here is my pictured story, rather concentration on the (major size) pictures than on a lot of text.

 

Gran Canaria Avation Monuments – Map

You can see the three monuments I visited on the map below: the first one, the JK 5022 memorial, is located in central Las Palmas, while the Monumento Aviacion and the Binter DC-7 are both quite easily connected to the GC-1 motorway.

 

Spanair JK 5022 Memorial (Las Palmas)

On 20th August 2008, the Spanair flight JK 5022 from Madrid-Barajas airport to Gran Canaria crashed just after take off at Madrid runway 36L. Only 18 of the 172 passengers and crew survived. While the key memory plaque is located within the grounds of Madrid Airport (and is thus not too easy to access), the city of Las Palmas is keeping memory of the passengers people were waiting for – and who never arrived on the Canary Island. For details about the crash, which was a mixture of human and technical failure (major cause were incorrect slats), I recommend the corresponding Wikipedia page.

 

 

Monumento Aviacion (Las Majoreras)

The Monumento Aviacion is a small part memorizing the history of flight on the island in Las Majoreras, which is more or less opposite of the beginnings of the runways 3R/3L of Las Palmas Airport. Thus, the place is quite nice for planespotting with that additional style. The major cargo plane is a CASA C-212 Aviocar, which has been quite popular at the Spanish Armed forces. The exact model in display is the C-212A, the original military version of the plane. The updated Series 200 is still in production in Indonesia. The historic plane is the Bleriot XI, reminding of Louis Bleriot, who was the first to land in Gran Canaria using that plane model.

 

Binter Canarias DC-7 (Tarajalillo)

If you are around Tajalillo, close to Bahia Feliz (where I have been for my Zärtliche Chaoten II chase), at the airfield El Berriel (which is used for general aviation and minor planes), you just cannot miss that DC-7, which is beautifully located at a hill over the airfield. If you look for historic pictures of this plane, you will see that the former Spantax plane was in terrible condition until the early 2010’s, when Canary Island’s local airlines Binter decided to restore the plane. Nowadays, it is serving as a monument to praise charter aviation, which brought tourism and wealth to the island. The plane indeed connected El Berriel with Central Europe and the USA, but it never operated under Binter colors. The plane is a real beauty nowadays – and a lovely viewpoint as well.

Quite close to the plane, there is also a nice small memorial site by the Royal Aeroclub San Agustin, who are the owners of the ground on which the DC-7 is located.

 

Flyctory.com on Gran Canaria

Here are all postings related to Gran Canaria (Grand Canary), Canary Islands:

 

Flyctory.com Pictured Stories

The key contents of Flyctory.com Pictured Stories are the picture, not the text:

 

You might also like

Pittsburgh Christmas Market and Ice Rink

Elvis Presley’s Graceland – The Mansion

Walking through Nicosia (Pictured Story)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *