We were plagued by prejudice and doubt when we first thought about the Canary Islands. Would there be anything interesting to see apart from the usual ugly outgrowth of mass tourism? Would we come across anything that would illuminate the complex issue of urbanisation in the twenty-first century? Specifically, we did not want to highlight the issue of tourism as such; rather we wanted to investigate its concrete, architectural consequences with respect to the rapid advance of urbanisation over all seven Canary Islands. Tourism is the driving economic force behind urbanisation processes. Not only does it modify the landscape and displace the preceding transformation brought about by the “age of agriculture”, but it also creates a new form of spatial and social differentiation.