The two festivals that move every year

These are the two festivals you cannot pencil into next year's diary without doing a calculation. Both depend on Easter Sunday, which in turn depends on the moon, and both are lived in the north quite differently from how they are lived in Santa Cruz.

How they are worked out

Shrove Tuesday

47 days before Easter Sunday

Corpus Christi

63 days after Easter Sunday, because in Spain it moves to the Sunday

In both Icod and Garachico, Shrove Tuesday is a local public holiday, published as such each year in the Canary Islands official gazette. One caveat: the Tuesday being a holiday does not mean the main events happen that day. The parade, the murga choirs and the burial of the sardine are scheduled by each council and often fall on other dates.

Corpus and the carpets

This is the one most worth planning a trip around if it coincides. Through the night before, neighbours lay carpets on the street made of flowers and coloured earth, and in the morning the procession walks over them and destroys them. In Icod they are documented in Santa Bárbara and Camino de La Cruz; in Garachico, along Esteban de Ponte and Calvo Sotelo. If it interests you, the thing to do is go in the small hours to watch them being made, not mid-morning to see them already trodden.

See the calendar with the dates already worked out