Las Islas Carnarias_____en el oceano atlantico

Question

You are using exceptions of the rules to trick students. You can't move islands, so it makes sense to use "son en el oceano atlantico" and you know all A1 students will get that question wrong.

Accepted Answer

Hello Uncle
Believe me, there's no intention at all from Kwiziq to trick students or anyone.
This lesson (Using estar when talking about locations) is aimed to A1 students. It is a very common topic that you will find in any other plattform for learning Spanish. 
You may have heard this very general rule about "using ser for permanent things and using estar for non-permanent things" - we try to avoid that general rule because there are exceptions and it depends on how one explains that rule that you get a different interpretation. This is the reason why we created micro-lessons on all uses of ser and estar from A1 to C1, so you can see these uses more in context. 
When you are saying "where something is, is located, physically" you use "estar"; we're talking about position of things (or people). If we say that the Canary islands are in the Atlantic, we are talking about where they are "located". It doesn't matter that they are always there (as they obviously don't move) - the fact that we are just saying "where they are" overtakes that very general rule of "permanency=ser". 
I hope this clarified it.
Saludos cordiales
Inma

Answer

We could perhaps regard the fact that 'estar' carries those two apparently quite different meanings, as a bit of a puzzle [although realising and accepting that, is of course a way of remembering them]:

1. Location;

2. Indicating the condition or the state which an object happens to be in [which is why "estar" is often associated with non-permanent or transitional attributes].

By going back to the ancestral Latin language, we can get some idea of how that^ arose.

The Latin verb "stare" means "to stand"- which obviously led to the location description.

The [related] Latin noun "status" translates as 'condition', or 'state' - [presumably by extending the concepts of 'circumstance' or 'standing']. The Spanish noun "estado" was derived from this Latin one.

As they developed, Spanish [and Portuguese and Italian] retained both Latin verbs, i.e., "stare" became "estar", and "esse" became "ser".

However, as French evolved (also out of Latin), it decided to merge the two verbs into one - namely "être", which adopted most of its person-conjugation-forms from the Latin verb "esse". The one exception was the formal you > "Vous êtes" (which, like the imperfect "étais", the participle "été" and perhaps the infinitive "être") is related to "état", the French term for "state" or "condition")... I have the impression that Catalan also settled on just one verb: [please correct me if I'm wrong?]

Answer

I guess sometimes it's not about understanding why. Sometimes there's no answer to all these structures and rules that were arbitrarily created in these abstract "human" languages. Not everything fits neatly into a box.

Just have to let go and go with the flow