One can say that we got this brief visit to Gran Canaria for free, since the most affordable route to Western Sahara produced a stop-over on the island anyway. We used this opportunity to see the recently split Gran Canaria Blue Chaffinch, previously treated as a subspecies of the Tenerife birds. On Gran Canaria the birds survives in a few small pockets of pines in the mountains, and they number in a few hundreds only. This makes the Gran Canaria Blue Chaffinch the rarest and most threatened bird species in the whole Western Palearctic region. Excess time was spent with relaxed birding in the Maspalomas area.