The resilience with which Gran Canaria weathered the onslaught of Storm Therese is not a matter of chance, but rather the result of the high level of preparedness of a society that has made prevention its best shield. In this crisis, the education of Gran Canaria's residents, as evidenced on social media, and the rigor of the island's emergency engineers were the driving force behind a resilient operation that functioned with surgical precision, designing drainage and safety protocols that prevented the collapse of the southern part of the island. Of course, there were mistakes, but everyone took care to help and avoid the chain of recriminations about ill-conceived ideas amidst the danger faced by human beings (they were human beings), for example, navigating through water-filled ravines in canoes.
Gran Canaria's success against the historic Storm Therese lies not only in its seawalls or the sophisticated calculations of its engineers, but also in the impeccable alliance between the scientific expertise of its scientists and the composure of an educated people who know how to care for their own. It is the victory of an island that, when the skies darken, responds with the light of its knowledge and the strength of its institutions so that, when the sun rises, the south of Gran Canaria remains the safe haven so admired by the world.
Alongside them, the role of the Army with the Canary Islands Command, the UME (Military Emergency Unit), the Civil Guard, the National Police, Civil Protection, and the Local Security Forces and the Canary Islands Police intervention unit has been crucial, not only for their logistical capacity to deploy to critical points of the island's terrain, but also for representing that discipline and vocation of service that guarantees that, while the storm rages, vital infrastructures and the protection of citizens remain intact.
This disparity in rainfall is due to the fragmented terrain of the islands and the difficulty predictive models have in pinpointing the storm's center. Aemet (the Spanish State Meteorological Agency) acknowledges that the positioning of Therese's center, shifted by a mere 50 kilometers to the east or west, determines whether the impact is devastating or practically nonexistent in coastal areas. In the case of Gran Canaria, the uncertainty forced the issuance of warnings with very little advance notice due to "inconsistencies between models," a situation that kept hotel and service providers in the south on edge, as they anxiously monitored the ravines for the possibility of a repeat of the images of impromptu "rivers" seen in other parts of the archipelago.
The first phase of Storm Therese was marked by well-defined wind and swell fronts that affected the beaches of Maspalomas and Playa del Inglés, but it was from the weekend onwards that the system became unpredictable. The arrival of the storm's core introduced a dynamic of thunderstorms with lightning that, although it hit the north of Tenerife particularly hard—with torrential downpours of 60 liters per hour at stations like Tacoronte—in the south of Gran Canaria resulted in persistent cloud cover and episodes of moderate rain that forced the precautionary evacuation of sunbeds and classrooms.
With the storm now in its final throes before the expected arrival of a high-pressure system, the situation in the south of the island is a relief compared to the magnitude of the damage recorded in the rest of the province. The meteorological services' ability to manage the situation with orange alerts issued 72 hours in advance allowed for some planning, although Therese's final behavior has served as a reminder of the vulnerability of a region where the distance between normality and catastrophe is measured in just a few kilometers of terrain. The storm's departure now gives way to the return of sunshine, an essential element for reviving commercial activity as this eventful month of March 2026 draws to a close.
