Canary Islands: Which Island, Which Town?
 

Hello! I am planning a trip to the Canary Islands for my husband, 10 & 5 year-old-boys and myself for April. We love beautiful scenery, charming towns, and the opportunity for great walks. This year, my husband also asked for some beach time, and so we thought the Canary Islands would be a great fit. I'm posting this to Spain because most folks seem to put it in the Europe forum vs. Africa.
I’ve been reading forums and guidebooks and would love your input on which island we would love most, and which charming town we should use as our home base.

Our plan is to arrive in the Canaries (from Chicago changing planes in Madrid) on Friday, April 4. We’d like to have two beach days, 1 day of whale-watching, two days of hiking and possibly one day to explore, then to fly to Madrid and spend two or three nights there before returning to Chicago on Saturday or Sunday, April 11 or 12. We’ve all enjoyed Greece (Athens and Aegina last spring) and are excited for our adventure this year.

We’d like to minimize time spent packing up and moving from place to place, so we’d like to choose one town in the Canaries to use as our home base. We love scenic, charming, old-world-feeling towns and don’t have any interest in the resorts that attract folks looking primarily for sun.

Some other notes:

• While we’re looking for beach time, it doesn’t have to be the absolute best beaches, just nice places to get into the ocean for a few hours. (We would likely not spend an entire day at the beach, just a morning or afternoon, and spend the rest of the day doing other things.)
• We love it when we can rely on public transit or taxis on trips, as these are fun for the kids and add to the adventure feel, but we are prepared to rent a car on this trip if it makes sense
• For the whale/dolphin watching, my ideal would be to find a private tour for our family that can take us out for a few hours and combine whale watching with snorkeling if the weather permits. It looks like most cruises for these things go from Playa San Juan in Tenerife and Puerto Rico in Gran Canaria, and we are prepared to drive to it, rather than staying right next door
• For the hiking, four to six mile hikes would probably be ideal. Enough to feel like we’ve done something and gotten somewhere away from the tour buses, but not so long the kids are miserable.
• For the town, we love being able to walk to dinner and have our choice of several restaurants. We’re looking forward to traditional food and Spanish food, though excellent Italian-style pizza is always appreciated by our crew, as well.
• We typically book AirBnbs, but the lure of a pool might be enough for us to look for a hotel that could work for our family.
• We don’t need our schedule to be packed morning to night. Just having nice places to stroll around from our homebase is more appealing to us than hitting three museums in a day.

Tenerife seems like an obvious choice since it has a lot of flights, and Puerto de la Cruz and La Orotava sound nice. I’d love input on them and whether there are other choices that might be better.La Gomera also sounds really lovely, but there don’t seem to be direct flights from Madrid. It appears to be a short flight from Tenerife, though, so perhaps changing planes is worth it? If so, which town would you recommend?The walking in Gran Canaria sounds great but I’m not sure which town would make a good home base. Is Las Palmas a charming city?The other islands don’t seem to have direct flights from Madrid and I’m not sure if they’d be worth a change.Thank you in advance for your ideas and opinions!