Gran Canaria Airport

A royal order signed by King Alfonso XIII on April 7, 1930 converts the existing military installations at Gando into a civil airfield, building on French aviator Pierre Latécoère's earlier interest in a Toulouse-Casablanca-Canaries air route.

Following construction of a passenger terminal between 1944 and 1946, the airport is officially declared open to domestic and international air traffic in July 1946.

A new passenger terminal, under construction since 1970, opens in March 1973 to handle rapidly growing tourist traffic to the island.

On March 27, 1977, a bomb planted by Canarian separatists explodes in the terminal building, injuring eight people, in the same period as the nearby Tenerife runway disaster.

A second runway is completed, allowing the airport to handle higher volumes of traffic as Canary Islands tourism expands through the 1980s.

Ryanair announces new bases across the Canary Islands, including Gran Canaria, expanding low-cost point-to-point connectivity to mainland Europe.

Gran Canaria's designation as one of NASA's Transatlantic Abort Landing (TAL) sites for the Space Shuttle program becomes moot when the Shuttle program concludes in July 2011.

Annual passenger traffic exceeds 10.3 million, cementing the airport's role as the busiest in the Canary Islands.