The reviewed island
845 square kilometres of lava, vines and white villages, and a small eighth island off the north coast. Scroll to see where the reviews actually come from, and what changes as you leave the coast.
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Every place you can book
One dot per property with at least fifteen reviews, sized by how many it has. The interior of the island, which is most of the island, is nearly empty.
Properties below fifteen reviews are left out; the ones shown cover 97% of all reviews.
Seven municipalities
Arrecife is the capital and the port. Tías, Yaiza and Teguise hold the three resort strips. Haría, Tinajo and San Bartolomé are the interior and the north, where most of the land is and almost none of the dots.
Boundaries: IGN and INE municipal limits, simplified. La Graciosa belongs to Teguise.
Where the reviews are
Colour is the number of reviews. Tías, which contains Puerto del Carmen, holds 36% of everything written about the island. Add Yaiza and Teguise and you are at 76%.
Three strips
These three coastal strips, a few kilometres each, produce 61% of all reviews on the island. Every dot on the map is a property with at least fifteen reviews; the size is how many.
The clustering is the point. Booking.com's Lanzarote is not the island, it is its western and southern shoreline.
Satisfaction
The three strips average 8.53. The rest of the island averages 8.73. One in four reviews in the strips carries a complaint, against one in five elsewhere.
Not a scandal, an expected pattern: the strips are older, denser, and sell a cheaper room to a guest who stays longer.
The capital
Median stay 3 nights against six in the strips. The lowest average star rating on the island at 2.98, the highest share of guesthouses, and the highest share of Spanish guests. This is a city product wearing a beach island's clothes.
The other island
Haría, Tinajo and San Bartolomé score 8.78 and carry a complaint in fewer than one review in five. They sell villas, country houses and vacation homes to Spanish, French and Italian guests for four nights. It is a different product on the same island.
Each place has a signature
Pick a topic and the map redraws by locality, because the signature belongs to the resort rather than the municipality. Cleanliness peaks in Costa Teguise, beds in Famara and Arrecife, food where the all-inclusive hotels are. Circle size is the number of reviews.
Rate per 100 reviews with text. Only topics that survived validation against an independent model are offered here.
Who goes where
Spanish guests are 21% of reviews in Puerto del Carmen and 74% in Caleta de Sebo, on La Graciosa. Between those two points the share climbs steadily as you move inland and north.
Irish guests are the sharpest case of all. They are 27% of Puerto del Carmen and 2% of Arrecife, twelve kilometres away. One strip is effectively a different market from the rest of the island.
Share of each locality's reviews written by guests from Spain. Guest country as declared to Booking.
Now look for yourself
Click any municipality on the map at any point to read its numbers, and switch the topic in the step above. When you want to combine filters, cross a market with a season or a star rating, the data view does that on the full 597,549 reviews.
Municipal boundaries come from the es-atlas TopoJSON of Spanish municipalities, itself derived from IGN and INE limits, decoded and simplified for web display. Every property is assigned to a municipality by point in polygon on its coordinates, not by the free-text city field in the export, which mixes neighbourhoods with municipalities. Coastal properties that fall a few metres outside a simplified boundary are assigned to the nearest municipality within three kilometres; that fallback applies to 591 of 7,653 properties and no property is left unassigned.
Property dots are limited to the 4,918 properties with at least fifteen reviews, which together cover 97% of all reviews. Topic rates are suppressed for any area with fewer than 150 reviews carrying text.
Built for NECSTouR. Analysis and design by Josep Ferrer.