Playa del Inglés (Spanish: [ˈplaʝa ðel iŋˈgles], lit. "Englishman's Beach") is a sea resort in the south coast of the island of Gran Canaria. It is part of the municipality of San Bartolomé de Tirajana, and is a popular tourist attraction. The resident population was 7,515 in 2013
Playa del Inglés forms part a large sea resort zone, together with the adjacent resort towns San Agustín, Maspalomas and Sonnenland. The Maspalomas Dunes are situated south of the resort.
The area remained largely unspoiled until the 1960s when large scale tourist development changed the resort. Many of these constructions were large concrete tower blocks, however many have undergone renovation in recent years to make them more sympathetic to the surrounding area. There are a number of large shopping centres in the resort with the 'Yumbo' and 'Kasbah' being the largest.
Maspalomas (/ˌmɑːspəˈlɒməs/, Spanish: [maspaˈlomas]) is a tourist town in the south of the island of Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, stretching from Bahía Feliz in the east to Meloneras in the west, including the resort towns of San Agustín and Playa del Inglés. Maspalomas constitutes the southernmost part of the municipality of San Bartolomé de Tirajana, and of the island. Before the era of tourism, Maspalomas was the name of a hamlet in what today is San Fernando de Maspalomas. Its name may derive from that of Rodrigo Mas de Palomar, a settler and soldier from Majorca, or from Francisco Palomar, a Genoese friend of Alonso Fernandez de Lugo who purchased 87 Guanche slaves from Güímar and settled in the area.
Present-day Maspalomas is the result of an ambitious development project, organized in the form of an International Ideas Contest (opened to any member of the International Union of Architects), held in 1961 under the auspice of Alejandro del Castillo, owner and promoter of most of the space under construction. The contest was won by the French office SETAP (including the urbanist Guy Lagneau and the economist Michel Weill) and covered the 1,060 hectares (2,600 acres) and 19 kilometres (12 mi) of coast that constitute the core area of Maspalomas - Costa Canaria. The contest paved the way for a particular way of understanding "touristic" urbanism that served as model for later tourists developments in other Canary Islands.