🪣Tips : Cañada de Los Gatos: The Archaeological Site Hiding Right by the beach

Most visitors to Puerto de Mogán head straight for the beach, harbour, or the Friday market, and it's easy to understand why. But just a short walk from all of that, at the mouth of the Mogán valley, sits something quite different: the remains of an aboriginal settlement that predates the Spanish conquest of Gran Canaria by well over a thousand years.

Thank you to Cathy Hannam, a regular in our community, for first pointing this one out. It's the kind of place many visitors walk past without ever realising it's there.

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## What Cañada de Los Gatos actually is

Cañada de Los Gatos is a small settlement of stone houses, originally part of a much larger aboriginal village that once stood at the mouth of the Barranco de Mogán. Today, only a handful of structures from that wider settlement survive, including these houses, some burial mounds nearby at La Puntilla, a dwelling known as the Casa de las Siete Esquinas (House of Seven Corners), and the Las Crucecitas cemetery.

What makes the site particularly interesting is how long it was used. Carbon-14 dating places the first occupation of some of these houses at around the 3rd century AD, roughly 1,700 years ago, but the site continued to be inhabited, rebuilt and adapted for centuries afterwards. You can actually see this layered history reflected in the construction itself: walls were extended, houses collapsed and were rebuilt using different techniques over time, and the information panels along the path do a good job of explaining these changes as you walk through.

Many of the houses follow a distinctive cross-shaped interior layout (cruciforme), a construction style considered typical of aboriginal Gran Canaria. The circular exterior walls, partially built into the hillside, were designed to protect the dwellings from the torrential rain that would occasionally run down the ravine.

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## Where it is

The site sits on Calle La Puntilla in Playa de Mogán, right at the edge of the beach.. If you're staying in Puerto de Mogán, this is genuinely walking distance, you don't need a car or a bus to get there.

If you're coming from further afield on the island, approximate travel times are:

- From Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: around 78 km (roughly 55 minutes by car)

- From Maspalomas: around 25 km (roughly 20 minutes)

- From Arguineguín: around 15 km (roughly 13 minutes)

- From Puerto Rico: around 10.5 km (roughly 12 minutes)

- From Gran Canaria Airport: around 54 km (roughly 37 minutes)

By public bus (Guaguas Global):

- From Maspalomas (Faro de Maspalomas interchange): Line 32 direct to Playa de Mogán

- From Las Palmas (San Telmo interchange): Line 50 to the Faro de Maspalomas interchange, then transfer to Line 32

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## Opening hours

- Tuesday to Sunday: 10:00–17:00

- Saturday: 10:00–16:00

- Closed Mondays

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## Entrance prices

- Adults (15–64 years): €4

- Children (10–14 years): €2

- Adults 65 and over: €2

- Children under 10: free

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## What to expect when you visit

The path winds down through the ruins via a series of walkways and viewing platforms, giving you a good vantage point over the circular stone structures without walking directly through the excavated areas. Multilingual information panels are placed throughout, so you don't need to book a guided tour to understand what you're looking at, though the detail on some of the panels is genuinely worth slowing down to read properly.

From several points along the path, you also get lovely views out over the harbour and marina, an unusual contrast between the ancient and the modern that's part of what makes this spot worth the detour.

A note on accessibility: the terrain is uneven in places, with steps and slopes, so it isn't currently suitable for wheelchairs or those with limited mobility.

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## Our take

This isn't a large site, and you won't need more than half an hour or so to see it properly, but that's rather the point. It's a quiet, unhurried change of pace from the beach, and a genuine reminder that Puerto de Mogán's history goes back a great deal further than its harbour and pastel-coloured buildings suggest.

If you've visited, we'd love to hear what you thought, drop a comment below or come and share your photos with the community 🌺

Offical went: https://www.arqueologiacanaria.com/yacimientos_arqueologicos_singulares/arqueologia_canaria.html