Gando Bay, on the east coast of Gran Canaria, mattered to sailors long before aviators. The Air and Space Force’s own history of the base notes that Columbus’s fleet put in there for repairs in 1492, and that a quarantine station, the Lazareto designed by the engineer Juan de León y Castillo, opened on 21 March 1893. The flat, windy plain behind the bay made a natural landing ground, and on 18 January 1924 three Breguet XIV biplanes named Archipiélago Canario, Gran Canaria and Tenerife made the first landing there.

Two years later the bay itself became a stop on one of the great flights of the era. On 26 January 1926 the flying boat Plus Ultra, commanded by Ramón Franco, alighted at Gando to begin the second stage of its flight from Palos de la Frontera to Buenos Aires. The Dornier had left Palos on 22 January with a crew of four, including Julio Ruiz de Alda and the mechanic Pablo Rada, and covered about 10,270 km in all. In April 1930 a royal order declared the land and sea installations at Gando a national airport.

The military took over for good in the 1930s and 1940s. The Lazareto was occupied by the armed forces in 1936, and on 3 February 1939 the first contingent of military aviation arrived; on 1 September 1939 it was formally constituted as the Fuerzas del Atlántico, the air force’s first official presence in the islands. In August 1940 the 29 Grupo Expedicionario de Caza arrived from Getafe with 24 Fiat CR-32s, and on 30 May 1941 it merged with other units into Regimiento Mixto nº 4, the ancestor of today’s wing. The Lazareto passed to the Ejército del Aire in July 1946.

For half a century Gando faced Africa. Spain’s African territories of Ifni and the Spanish Sahara lie little more than 100 km from the Canaries, and the official unit history says the wing took part directly in the Saharan conflicts of 1957 and 1975, flying constant surveillance and patrol missions over the desert in between. The unit’s own lineage begins in the desert: its history traces it to the 1ª Escuadrilla Militar Española formed in the Sahara on 9 January 1928.

The Ifni War began with Moroccan attacks on 23 November 1957 and ended with the Treaty of Angra de Cintra in April 1958. On 25 November 1957 five CASA 2.111 bombers and five CASA 352 transports supported the relief of the post at Tiliuín, where 75 paratroopers were dropped. The Spanish-language encyclopedia entry on Gando lists He 111s from four bomber wings, T-6s and, from mid-February 1958, nine HA-1112 Buchón fighters in the campaign, and France and Spain together put about 150 aircraft into the joint offensive of February 1958. The Canarian units were then reorganised as Ala Mixta 36, with Ju 52, He 111, T-6 and Buchón squadrons.

The second crisis came in the mid-1970s, when Morocco pressed its claim to the Spanish Sahara. From August 1974 to December 1975 F-5s of Ala 21 rotated through Gando, and the encyclopedia entry credits them with more than 500 combat missions, including attacks, combat air patrols and reconnaissance. Morocco’s Green March crossed the border on 6 November 1975 with some 350,000 civilians; the Madrid Accords were signed on 14 November and Spain’s withdrawal was complete by 28 February 1976. Military activity at Gando, the English encyclopedia entry notes, was never more intense than in those months.

Ala 46 was formally established in 1965 and inherited everything flying at Gando: T-6s, DC-3s, HA-200 Saeta jet trainers, F-5s and later Mirage F1s and C-212 Aviocars. In the early 1970s its squadrons were 461 with the DC-3, 462 with the Saeta and 463 with armed T-6s. In 1975 a new all-weather fighter squadron, 464 Escuadrón, was activated; when the Mirage F1 arrived at Gando in 1982 it took the number 462, which it still carries. The Mirages were flown mainly as air-defence fighters.

In 1999, the official history says, the F-18 Hornet replaced the Mirage F1. Gando’s Hornets were not the jets Spain had bought new in the 1980s: in 1995 Spain bought 24 ex-US Navy F/A-18As, delivered from December 1995 to December 1998 and upgraded to EF-18A+ standard before service. The enthusiast blog Aeronaves Militares Españolas says they moved to Gando between 2001 and 2003 and were updated again in 2002–2006 on the initiative of the CLAEX test centre; the blog and the official 1999 date do not agree, and the transition probably ran over several years.

The mission has not changed since. The official page says 462 Escuadrón keeps an alert and immediate take-off service 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, for the air defence of the Canary Islands. Operationally the wing answers to the Mando Aéreo de Combate and organically to the Mando Aéreo de Canarias. The English encyclopedia entry puts the Hornet fleet at about 18 and counts ten hardened shelters; the blog says Gando shares the ten-shelter layout only with Albacete.

Replacing the Canary Islands Hornets was the first job for Spain’s new Eurofighter orders. The Council of Ministers of 14 December 2021 authorised multi-year spending for “el proyecto HALCÓN” along with Eurofighter modernisation and the S-80 submarine, and on 23 June 2022 Spain ordered 20 Tranche 4 Eurofighters, 16 single-seat and 4 two-seat, to replace the F/A-18s of Gando. A second batch, Halcón II, followed in December 2024 for the mainland.

The changeover at Gando did not wait for the new aircraft. According to Aeronaves Militares Españolas, an enthusiast blog and a secondary source, implementation of the Eurofighter at Gando began in September 2025, and on 26 June 2026 the first eight Eurofighters (C.16) arrived. They were Tranche 3 aircraft transferred from Ala 14 at Albacete and Ala 11 at Morón and renumbered 462-60, 462-61, 462-62, 462-67 and so on, not new Halcón jets. The six Hornets still operational at Gando moved to Ala 15 at Zaragoza, where they are to finish their service in December 2026.

The official Ala 46 page, checked on 28 September 2026, still describes 462 Escuadrón as a Hornet unit, and no official press release on the June 2026 changeover could be opened for this page. The dates and numbers above therefore rest on the blog, which is well informed but unofficial. When the Tranche 4 Halcón aircraft themselves will reach Gando was not confirmed by any source read for this page.

Gando’s second flying squadron does not fight. Its lineage begins in 1955 with the 51 Escuadrilla de Salvamento, created with two H-19 helicopters and one Grumman Albatross amphibian and later renumbered 802 Escuadrón. It flies search and rescue over a vast area of the eastern Atlantic between the Canaries and the African coast, and the blog Aeronaves Militares Españolas says it was placed under Ala 46’s Grupo 82 in a 2016 reorganisation, making Ala 46 the only combat wing with three weapon systems.

Its aircraft have changed with the decades. According to the same blog, four Aérospatiale AS332 Super Puma helicopters, designated HD.21, arrived in 1983–1984 to replace AB-205s in the rescue role; the English encyclopedia entry lists four H215M (Cougar) helicopters and three CN235-100MSA maritime aircraft. The blog reports that the first C295 MSA/SAR, serial D.6-01 and code 802-01, left the Airbus factory in Seville on 24 June 2026 to begin replacing the CN235s; eight C295s were ordered in December 2023. It says the new aircraft can keep up more than 11 hours of continuous surveillance.

802 Escuadrón works over one of the deadliest migration routes in the world, the Atlantic crossing from West Africa to the Canaries. No official figure for the number of migrants its crews have found or rescued could be opened for this page, and no rescue is described here without such a source. Civilian maritime rescue in Spanish waters is run by Salvamento Marítimo; the air force squadron’s share of that work is not quantified in any source read.

Gando is both an air base and one of Spain’s busiest holiday airports. The civil and military sides were separated after the first passenger terminal was built in 1944–1946. The runway grew from 700 m paved in 1948 to 2,000 m in 1957 and 3,100 m by 1960; a second runway opened in 1980. The Spanish AIP today lists two parallel runways, 03L/21R at 3,100 by 45 m and 03R/21L at 3,099 by 45 m, both asphalt concrete, at an elevation of 24 m.

The AIP names two operators: Aena for the civil airport and the Ejército del Aire y del Espacio at the Base Aérea de Gando, 35230 Telde. It sets aside a military apron for aircraft carrying dangerous goods and arresting systems for military helicopters, and reserves two taxiways and a gate for military helicopter take-offs and landings in visual conditions. In 2021 the airport handled 6,899,523 passengers and 83,983 aircraft movements.

The shared airfield has had unusual visitors. On 21 April 1997 an L-1011 TriStar flew from Gando to air-launch the Pegasus XL rocket that put Minisat 01, Spain’s first satellite, into orbit; the same rocket carried the cremated remains of Gene Roddenberry, Timothy Leary and others. Gando was listed as a Space Shuttle emergency landing site until 2011, and in 2006 Spain offered it as headquarters for the new US Africa Command, which went to Stuttgart instead.