
ADA Gran Canaria · Asociación en Defensa de los Animales
Gran Canaria
A rescue run entirely by volunteers, with no subsidies, and cats for adoption.
We have 4 shelters and rescues located in Las Palmas, with what is known about each one: where it is, how to phone and its website. Below them, the cat associations in the Canary Islands and the search sites for cats up for adoption.
Phone before you go: many only open by appointment and do not always have cats (in spring and summer, with the litters, they usually have many more). Those marked “Cats only” work exclusively with cats.

Gran Canaria
A rescue run entirely by volunteers, with no subsidies, and cats for adoption.

Carretera General del Norte 86, Arucas
The Gran Canaria island council centre. Cat adoption is by appointment, booked on its website.

No contact details published. It is on the map, but to get in touch you will have to look it up by name.
Locations come from OpenStreetMap, © its contributors, under the ODbL licence · downloaded on 23 September 2026. We have removed the pounds and shelters that only take in dogs, and the linked websites lead, where there is one, to their cat section. Phone numbers and websites that OSM does not have are taken from each organisation’s own website or from its town council’s, so if anything has changed, go by what their website says. Is one missing or is something wrong? “Suggest a correction” fixes it on the map, and it will show up here in the next update.
They work only with cats, almost always through foster homes: their cats are socialised in a home, and they can tell you what each one is really like.
They bring together the listings of hundreds of rescues. Each link takes you straight to the cat section, where you can filter by province, age and sex. The sites are in Spanish, but your browser’s translate option copes well with the listings.
The ones with a confirmed address are spread across Arucas and Gran Canaria, so it pays to check the map before deciding which one to visit: with a cat you have to go and meet it and then go back to collect it with the carrier. 2 of them can be reached by phone and 3 have their own website, which we link to their cat section where there is one. Hardly any of them publish fixed opening hours, and many cats live in foster homes rather than at the shelter, so phone or write before turning up. One is publicly owned, run by town councils, provincial or island councils or groups of municipalities: that is where the cats picked up from the street and the surrendered ones end up, and they tend to have more turnover than the associations. One works only with cats.
The search sites on this page filter by Las Palmas and show the cats available right now, but not everything is there: kittens are what gets published most, and adults, seniors and cats with special needs rarely make the front page. If you are looking for one of those, writing directly to the rescue works much better than trawling through listings. And if you cannot find yours in Las Palmas, many associations in the Canary Islands rehome to other provinces, with transport arranged between volunteers.
Spain’s animal welfare law, Law 7/2023, sets the common minimum for the whole country; each region also has its own law and register, and each town council its own bylaws.
The national law requires every cat to be identified with a microchip and neutered before six months of age, except those registered as breeding animals with a registered breeder (art. 26). It bans the sale of cats in pet shops: only registered breeders may sell them (art. 27), and it does not allow a pet to be left unsupervised for more than three days in a row. Public centres must hand animals over for adoption identified, with a contract, and neutered or with a commitment to have it done (art. 23). In the Canary Islands, Law 8/1991 on animal protection, of 30 April, also applies, and the microchip is recorded in the Canary Islands animal identification register (ZOOCAN). Its 1991 law only required dogs to be identified, and veterinary associations estimate that very few cats in the Canaries are chipped. Since Law 7/2023 it is compulsory for all of them. If the cat you adopt comes from a rescue, they or your vet will usually take care of transferring the microchip registration into your name. What each Spanish region requires (Spanish) →
Third-party directories, in case you want to compare (in Spanish). These do take you away from Michipedia.