Neither Santa Cruz de Tenerife nor Las Palmas de Gran Canaria lead the urban employment insertion of the Archipelago. According to the latest Registered Active Population Survey (EPA-Reg) from the Canary Islands Institute of Statistics (Istac), corresponding to the third quarter of 2026, the highest employment levels are concentrated among residents of some neighborhoods in Arrecife.
Specifically, El Cable registers barely 1.6% unemployment and La Concha 3.2%, figures that surpass any neighborhood in the two autonomous capitals, including high-income areas such as Las Mimosas (4.6%) and Los Hoteles (5.7%) in the Tenerife capital, or La Minilla (5.5%) and Ciudad del Mar (6.1%) in Gran Canaria.
They even exceed the lows in Arona, the great tourist engine of southern Tenerife, where Playa de las Américas and Chayofa mark 6.6% and 6.8%, respectively.
The figures for some neighborhoods in Arrecife contrast with significant pockets of unemployment in the Canary Islands capitals. In five capital neighborhoods—La Alegría, Barrio Nuevo, and San Pío X, in Santa Cruz; and Jinámar and El Lasso, in Las Palmas—more than one in four active people remain unemployed, exceeding 25%.
Although the threshold for the most affected areas has decreased compared to the previous quarter, when it exceeded 27%, the urban gap between El Cable's 1.6% and the worst records is close to 24 percentage points. This street-level snapshot is possible thanks to the EPA-Reg, an indicator developed from administrative cross-referencing by the Canary Islands Employment Service and currently available for the two Canary Islands capitals, as well as for Arrecife and Arona.
The dynamism of the Arrecife neighborhoods reproduces on a small scale the municipal and island trend, where tourism continues to set the pace. Yaiza leads the Canary Islands with the lowest unemployment rate (5.5%), followed by Pájara (5.7%), Tías (6.7%), Alajeró (6.8%), and Teguise (6.9%). At the opposite end, La Palma (14.5%) and Gran Canaria (14%) concentrate the worst island figures, with the La Palma municipality of Garafía at the bottom of the Archipelago (22.5%).
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