Canary Islands

Off the coast of Africa, the Canary Islands offer volcanic landscapes, year-round sunshine, and diverse terrain from lush forests to desert dunes. Experience Spanish island life with a unique twist in immersive VR180, filmed in up to 16K.

The Canaries set leans hard on Gran Canaria, and it is the strangest terrain in our library. Roque Nublo, the eighty metre volcanic monolith that The Heights of Roque Nublo climbs to, is exactly the sort of object VR180 was made for: one enormous vertical thing standing alone with open sky around it, so your two eyes have something unambiguous to triangulate against. Desert Bloom at Roque Nublo holds the same rock from a fixed camera with flowers at its base, and the difference between walking up to it and standing still in front of it is worth watching back to back.

What earns these islands a hub of their own is how many climates fit inside a short drive. Atlantic Dunes puts you on shifting sand on the south coast, where desert runs straight into ocean. Tejeda Mountain Village sits over a thousand metres up in the volcanic interior. Atlantic Waves and Sunset Over Sand and Stone are both volcanic rock taking the full weight of the Atlantic swell. Slot Canyon goes the other way entirely, into a passage where the walls twist close on both sides and the sky narrows to a strip, which is one of the few places a headset genuinely feels like somewhere.

There is no real off-season out here. The islands sit far enough south to stay warm year round, so this is a set without a winter, and the terrain is what changes rather than the calendar. Volcanic rock needs hard, low, side-on light to show its texture, which is why the two sunset titles are worth saving for last: Island Summit Sunset from the high peaks and Sunset Over Sand and Stone down where the waves are hitting. Cactus of the Canaries is the outlier, a garden of towering succulents that is more sculpture park than landscape, and Rainbow Mountain is the quiet one, a fixed camera at the foot of a banded hillside with golden grass moving in the breeze.

A good pairing to open with: The Heights of Roque Nublo, which climbs from forest path to bare rock and finishes at the island’s landmark. Atlantic Dunes then takes you to the other extreme, sand moving underfoot and the sea straight ahead.

Half of every desert scene in our library was filmed on these islands, and the summit titles carry over as well, so this set runs through Deserts and Mountains.