Gay Guide to Gran Canaria
Spain went from criminalizing gay people to marrying them inside a single generation. Under Franco, homosexuality was prosecuted through vagrancy and "social danger" laws that could mean prison or a work camp. Those provisions were repealed in 1979, four years after his death. By 2005 Spain had legalized same-sex marriage, the third country in the world to do it, and it did so with the Catholic Church campaigning loudly against.
Gran Canaria became a refuge for northern European gay travelers during those same decades, and the island has been built around that ever since. The center of it is the Yumbo Centre in Playa del Inglés, which is genuinely strange the first time you see it: an ordinary 1980s shopping mall by day, shops and cafes and tourists with sunburn, that empties out and refills after dark as several floors of gay bars, drag shows and clubs running until sunrise.
The Maspalomas dunes sit just south, a protected stretch of desert running down to the sea. The gay section of the beach is long established and signposted by the marker posts along the sand rather than by anything official.
The island runs two Prides a year, which almost nowhere else does. Maspalomas Pride comes in early May. Winter Pride arrives in early November and exists precisely because the weather still holds: it began in 2014 as a small off-season party and grew into a full week.
That second date is the argument for Gran Canaria over most of Europe. In November the bars are busy and the beach is warm.