Record numbers: Spain courts Canadians with new routes, Gaudí parties & solar eclipse

The Tourist Office and Spain gathered 50 Canadian travel media for a celebration of the past year — and an exciting look forward — for the destination at Toronto’s Portland Square Social Club on Wednesday (Dec. 3)

Guests nibbled on tapas and Spanish ham, listened to a flamenco guitarist and got all the delicious dish on what’s coming up in Spain for 2026.

The biggest news? The upcoming launch of three new direct flights, an historic art anniversary and an awe-inspiring natural phenomenon passing over the Spanish skies.

The new flights won’t just be zooming out of major centres, either. Air Canada will be starting a direct Montreal-to-Palma de Mallorca trip and Iberia will be kicking off a Toronto-to-Madrid route (both taking to the skies in June), but even Halifax is getting in on the action with its own straight line to Madrid via WestJet starting in May.

These are in addition to other recent new direct flights from WestJet and Air Transat, boosting Canadian access to Spain through major gateways like Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, and Halifax.

“Now we are very well connected!” Isabel Martín Benítez, the Consul for Tourism Affairs, Embassy of Spain in Canada, told PAX. “It’s very exciting.”

Gaudí parties & solar eclipse

The tentpole events that travellers will be snapping up tickets to Spain for in 2026 include celebrations for the 100th anniversary of the death of Antoni Gaudí, the famous Catalan architect known for his unique, organic style and iconic buildings and parks across Barcelona.

And there’s already a massive surge of bookings from stargazing tourists, who will flooding Spain for a glimpse of a total solar eclipse on August 12, which will be visible across the northern half of the country and the Balearic Islands.

Canadian visitation rises

It's shaping up to be another banner year for Spain after a record-setting 2025, where even Martín Benítez was surprised by the surge in traffic from Canadian vacationers.

Canadian travel to Spain was up by at least 20 per cent in the first five months of the year, thanks in part to hesitancy about U.S. travel.

“I didn’t realize we were going to have such an amazing year!” she said. “We noticed that Canadians were looking for other places, and really looking at Europe, where they discovered new places in Spain.”

Martín Benítez told the crowd that Canadians should expect the relationship with Spain to grow even stronger, unveiling plans to better position Spain as a winter destination, tempt more snowbirds and solo female travellers and shine a light on experiences in the Canary Islands, Basque Country, and Galicia.

Advisors whose clients love getting their vacation ideas from travel journalists may be suddenly getting a lot of new requests: the board also unveiled their upcoming roster of press trips, which include a journey with Canadian Geographic to Andalusia, a visit to the Gay Games 2026 in Valencia and a tour through the wine routes and unique food experiences of Castilla y León.

The tourist office will also be going big on collaborations with Spanish restaurants in Canada for World Tapas Day in June and is planning activations at the Vancouver International Film Festival and the Spain Tourism Summit in Montreal.

Martín Benítez was excited to see that in 2025 Canadians were extending the typical lengths of their trips from six days to eight, and she wants to encourage Canadians to use that extra time to look beyond the usual big-city hotspots at the many stunning regions across Spain.

“We’re very lucky,” she said. “We have 17 different regions, and each one is so different from the other-each has a different culture, a different gastronomy and a different landscape.” Spain is more like a continent than a country.”

She pointed out that even if visitors do want to plant a flag in a Barcelona or Madrid, thanks to Spain’s sophisticated high-speed train network, jumping between cities or to the countryside or the beach is ridiculously fast.

For example, you can get to Toledo from Madrid in an hour, or zip to Valencia in under two.

Now that’s livin’ la vida loca.

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