Winter sun in Spain: 30 towns that stay open all winter

Winter sun is the easy half. January warmth covers all of southern Spain and every Canary island. The hard half is whether the town is open when you arrive. Of the 132 places in our base, 65 barely close in winter.

How it is measured

Spain's social security agency publishes every month how many businesses in each municipality are registered as operating. We take cafés and restaurants, hotels and shops, and divide January by the summer peak month. A five means less than a tenth closes in winter. The data is for 2025, measured for 127 of 132 places.

5 places have no state figure of their own: they are villages inside another municipality, and the municipal figure would describe a town twenty kilometres from the sea. Their score is our estimate, and the «January» column shows a dash.

The thirty

First by how many months a year the sea is above twenty degrees, then by rent. The «January» column shows how many businesses operate in winter as a share of the summer peak. Nobody in the list is below 91 %.

«1-bed» is our asking-price estimate; «Registry» is the SERPAVISERPAVIThe Ministry of Housing's public registry of rents: medians of actual signed leases by municipality.Why it matters. Asking rent and signed rent are different things: an advert is today's price, while the registry also holds old leases whose rent has not moved in years. The registry shows what people actually pay. median of signed leases where the registry covers the municipality. Never mix them: across this list the asking price runs 1.2 times the signed lease at the median.

What the table shows

• The Canaries hold the top of the list: 16 of the thirty are on the islands. Their sea stays above twenty degrees for 7–10 months a year. The first mainland town comes in at number 18.
• The cheapest one-bed in the thirty is Adra at 400 € asking. Only 2 of the thirty rent above 800 € a month.
• The Costa Blanca has no towns in the list, and the Costa del Sol has 1 town. That does not mean they close in winter: 23 of their 26 places score 4 or 5, with a January median of 86 %. But only 7 of them score five, the thirty takes fives only, and at equal sea months the cheaper ones come first.

Cheapest winter sun

If price matters more than sea months, the list changes. Two conditions: a winter score of 4 or 5, and a sea above twenty degrees for at least 5 months a year — otherwise it is an open town without the sun. 64 places in our base qualify; below are the six cheapest.

Spain in winter, month by month

December, January and February are three different months, and the water shows it better than the air: the sea holds the autumn's heat for a long time and cools towards the end of winter. The table gives the median across our towns in each region, °C. The sea is a satellite measurement; daytime air is our estimate.

Spain in December

December water still carries the autumn. In our Mediterranean towns the sea is 2.2 °C warmer in December than in February at the median. It stays at 18 °C or more in December at 19 of 132 places, 18 of them on the Canaries, plus Tarifa.

Spain in January

January is the month our winter score measures: how many businesses operate in January against the summer peak. Of the 127 places with a state figure of their own, 65 have 90 % or more of their summer businesses working in January, and 19 fall below 60 %. The sea is at 18 °C or more in January at 18 places.

Spain in February

February is when the water is coldest: that holds for 100 of 132 places, and for the other 32 it is March. The Canaries keep 19.3 °C at the median; Catalonia drops to 13.4 °C.

If you are going in February, the water decides. Below are the six places scoring 4 or 5 in winter with the warmest February sea, and the average air temperature that month (our estimate).

How to verify in one evening

The figure comes from state data, but it is worth checking. Three checks take an evening and no trip. Look up the town bus timetable for January: resorts have a «summer» and a «winter» one, and winter is half as long. Open a map of venues and switch to «open now» for a February evening. Find the local residents' group and ask what shuts from November. If all three agree with the figure in the table, it holds.

Further

How the winter score works, and why heating and double glazing matter in a winter flat, is in our piece on which coastal towns are actually alive in winter. The Canary Islands on the same data, island by island, are in our piece on where the Canary Islands are. Winter by jobs, not only by businesses, is in our comparison of Mallorca and Menorca.

Term: winter liveabilitywinter liveabilityA 1-to-5 score of whether a town lives from November to March. Computed from state data: how many cafés, hotels and shops operate in January compared with the summer peak.Why it matters. Most resorts shut for winter. Tourists never notice; someone who moved gets four empty months. A few villages inside another municipality have no state figure of their own — there the score is our estimate, and it is labelled so.

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