The dunes of Correlejo remind us of the proximity of Africa
I have been waking up for five days with the beating of the waves and the trill of the birds. Enough to realize that this impromptu sound therapy is proving to be more effective than any beauty serum. I'm not talking about the new smart alarm on my mobile, but about the sound reality of my room . The sound of the sea enters through the terrace; that of the birds come from the palm trees that shade the pools. I'm in room 338 of the Grand Hotel Atlantis Bahia Real , in the northeast of Fuerteventura , a few hundred meters from the famous dunes of Corralejo. From the camera I see the first rays of the sun peeking out behind the islet of Lobos.
In a few moments the chambermaids will enter the scene, futilely struggling to control the curtains at the mercy of the wind on the two pontoons that the hotel built a few months ago from the beach , also enlarged, to allow us the joy of having a drink on the sea. When the waves become impertinent they can sneak into the cups, but what better than adding a pinch of salt to life.
I have spent five days thinking about what my guide, Ricardo, warned me as soon as I arrived: “ My father has always told us that in Fuerteventura you find what you bring with you ”. Ricardo's father is one of the many Scandinavians who, passing through the island, like so many others, decided to stay. What would Ricardo's father find that trapped him? What do I bring with me? What am I looking for?
The island of Lobos seen from the beach of Las Agujas
I can't help but feel like that German writer who he has been coming almost ten years in a row to write his successful self-help books . There is no doubt that he has known how to choose the place. Because, apart from the comforts of a large luxury hotel, the Bahía Real has a staff faithful to its Majorero uniform. And that shows. There may be more coquettish accommodations, more boutique, but this is, without a doubt, the highest category hotel on the island . And even more so now that you can go out to the beach from the breakfast room and that an extraordinary area for snorkeling has been created at the end of the pontoon structure. If this wasn't enough, Rita works at the spa, the most intuitive therapist on the whole island.
In the origins of its tourist career, Fuerteventura was already a spa destination . The first visitors who arrived from northern Europe to relax and catch some sun and their vitamins, back in the 50s, saw in the sincere nature of the island and in its uncontaminated horizons a guarantee of a better life. Especially if one was on vacation. At that time in the Canary Islands people went hungry , and this corner of the archipelago was the most impoverished and desolate. The first tourist houses were built in the 1960s and the large hotels in the 1970s. Some of the buildings that today seem like urban planning attacks received awards in their day and were imitated in other latitudes.
Pools of the Gran Hotel Atlantis Bahía Real
Currently, Fuerteventura has two tourist centers: Corralejo in the north Y Costa Calma and Morro Jable on the great beaches of the south, on the Jandía peninsula . Last year they reached a record number: 2,400,000 of the 13 million who visited the archipelago. Three quarters of them came from outside our borders. German, English, French, Italian, Polish, Swiss... Spain has not yet fully realized that Fuerteventura exists. New visitors are interested in learning to surf, even if they are not the age anymore, and they like to walk through places where there is apparently nothing and get into the sea when nobody else does. They are those who appreciate (and pay) that the cheese is organic and handmade , without preservatives or intermediaries.
Goats, dunes, beaches, wind, donkeys. Compared to the rest of the archipelago, Fuerteventura, the second largest island, is also the most deserted, the most distant, the most extreme, the most athletic, the wildest. It lacks the tropical foliage and wide variety of landscapes of the western islands, and it has lacked a César Manrique to protect it from the greed of cement , but she makes up for it with a special strength, with that something else that some define as energy and that may be given by age (she is also the oldest). But, above all, it compensates for its aridity with a sea that collects all the blues of the Caribbean. A privileged sea that more than contemplating it, requires living it . Waves, wind, kites, palm trees, volcanoes, space. In Fuerteventura one feels between the desert and the paradise.
The mills, so characteristic of the island's landscape
Although the volcanoes of Fuerteventura have been silent for too long, the landscape has become an X-ray where you can read the history patiently written by fire, water, wind and weather . Of course, the naked beauty of Fuerteventura is not for everyone. His magnetism is in the textures of the earth, in the whims of light and in the arrogance of the wind , something that is only visible to the one who finds abundance in the void or, in the words of Unamuno, “ for those who know how to discover a beautiful head in a skull ”.
Miguel de Unamuno was the rector of the University of Salamanca when, in 1924, Primo de Rivera banished him to the last corner of the country to silence his uncomfortable ideas . But Fuerteventura embraced him as it embraces poets and the prison-island became his liberation. It was barely four months but the intensity with which he lived them and the imprint they left on his thoughts is still noticeable in the emotion with which he is remembered. Don Miguel liked to sunbathe naked and chat with people . As he was forbidden to organize social gatherings, he went through the streets of Puerto Cabras, today Puerto del Rosario, from house to house and from door to door, planting his philosophical questions. His favorite view was from Burnt Mountain (In this intensely reddish-colored volcano today stands a tribute monument to him) and his perfect plan was to go to the town of Cotillo, eat barnacles and stroll through the small lagoons of La Concha beach. Don Miguel was not stupid, no.
Pendants of the Puertito Workshop in El Cotillo
mythologized as a kind of lay patron of the island , more and more travelers arrive to Betancuria, the old capital, and to El Cotillo looking for the "skeleton of the island" that he spoke of in From Fuerteventura to Paris. A few months ago, in these places where Unamuno fished for metaphors, the director Manuel Menchón was shooting a film about the love relationship between the basque thinker and the island . The shooting was really exciting, although it went much more unnoticed than Exodus: Gods and Kings, Ridley Scott's last film, in which he turned Fuerteventura into the Sinai Peninsula where the epic of Moses takes place, played by Christian Bale . Half of the island participated as extras. Fuerteventura is a good actress . She does the same thing as a Caribbean beach for brochures and fashion productions as well as a desert for the Three Wise Men for Christmas advertisements for El Corte Inglés.
Detail of The Blue Cow
Unamuno would be saddened to see how urbanizations have grown on the outskirts of Cotillo , but I think he would like the atmosphere that still exists in the town; and I'm sure he would want to come to the Blue Cow every day to eat the seafood soup. El Cotillo has the exact mix of old fishermen, young artists and independent travelers . The perfect proportion of houses chipped by saltpeter and cute little shops and restaurants that denote the sensitive taste and love invested by their owners. In a corner of the port, Merche, a jovial Galician with generous eyes like the ocean, she uses nuts and pipes to make real jewelry . She shares her sunny workshop with her cat, her dog, and her business partner, Eva, who works on her emotions on the island. “In Fuerteventura it is easy to stop and let yourself go,” Merche assures me. It's easy to be creative here." Two streets further up, her brother Diego has just opened a furniture store that he himself makes with pallets. He also sells paintings made from the remains of nets, perfumes and soaps that capture the aroma of the island, organic aloes... and a selection of local wines and delicatessen. At sunset, the roof of the store is transformed into a chill out, sometimes with live music.
At the exit of Cotillo to the south, beyond the fortress of Tostón, designed at the beginning of the 18th century as a defense against pirates , the coast extends in a succession of cliffs topped by lonely beaches where surfers practice. Cotillo's most famous beach, La Concha, is in the other direction, to the north. In it, the sea has created crystalline ponds in which children splash safely.
Wim Geirnaert, founder of the Clean Ocean Project
And it is that Fuerteventura is a whole beach. Actually there are many beaches. There are all kinds of them: long, wide, small, kilometers long, ephemeral, with white or black sand, or the color of gofio, beaches for families, to go alone, to get naked, to surf, to dive, to fish... But when the wind makes it impossible to read and the sea is not in the mood, then the real fun begins in Fuerteventura. When there are good waves, Lajares seems more like a ghost town than the official surfing capital of the most surfing island in Europe. Because if the Sotavento beach, to the south, in Jandía, is the venue for the Windsurfing & Kiteboarding World Championship, this strategic little town in the north of the island is the undisputed center of what is known as the North Shore (comparing it with the mythical north coast of Kauai). The best way, almost the only way, to get the pulse of the town is to sit at the door of the Canela bar to watch life go by. Day or night, this is the center of the action. Another good option is to stop by the market on Saturday mornings. With barely twenty stalls, it is the social event of the week.
“ Between Lajares and Vallebrón, live the last hippies in Europe ”, I have been assured. Also famous from the past who do not want to be recognized. But the majority are surfers, artists and artisans. Often all at once. People who live pending the waves and the whims of the sea. Nomads who have already passed through Bali, the Polynesia, Brazil, Mexico , and that they have found their place, or at least temporarily, and a way of life in accordance with their principles. That is the case of the boys of Stitch Craft , a brand of bags made from leftover windsurf sails.
View from Yolanda restaurant, in El Cotillo
“ There is so much surplus that is thrown away, both fabric and threads, that we decided to take advantage of it” , explains Thijs Vancayseele, one of the partners.
At the entrance to the town, the headquarters of Clean Ocean Project (the Clean Ocean Project) is a good banner of Lajares' philosophy. The Belgian Wim Geirnaert also came chasing waves and his love for the sea led him, 15 years ago, to found this organization with which he works to raise awareness about the need to take care of our oceans . In recent months he has been very busy denouncing the dangers of the controversial oil prospecting that has been carried out just 60 kilometers from the coast of Fuerteventura and Lanzarote , but now that the threat seems to have disappeared, Wim has focused his fight on campaigning against plastic and polluting coffee pods that we suddenly can't seem to live without. “ I am convinced that we are on the right track ”, He assures me optimistically.
In this oasis, in the Vega de Río Palmas ravine, Ridley Scott recreated Moisés' house for his latest film
As a good island, Fuerteventura has its own life and a character that shapes that of its inhabitants. Also that of many of its visitors. It may be, as Enrique Nacher said in his Cerco de arena, “ by the grains of sand that they swallow daily ”.
I've been eating freshly squeezed fruit juices for breakfast for five days. It comforts me that Frau Nelli and I like to sit in the same corner of the conservatory. Frau Nelli, who looks like one of The Golden Girls, spends at least a hundred days of winter at the Bahía Real. I wonder if Ridley Scott, who also stayed here, would come down for breakfast as another guest? . Christian Bale sure he ordered breakfast in his room.
The island of Lobos in a natural universe in itself
They say that before, in Fuerteventura, there were two distractions: watch the goats parade and watch the dunes walk . On the road that crosses the dunes of Corralejo, the sand forms an undulating veil on the asphalt. Contemplating how it flies with the blow of the wind or the passage of cars creates addiction. Just like looking at the kites that play in the sky. There are plans to increase the protection of the dunes and to divert the road to another less sensitive path. , but nobody talks about dates. If I look inland, this dune landscape makes me feel like Lawrence of Arabia in the Wadi Rum desert. If I look towards the sea, however, I immediately move to the Australian beaches of Byron Bay.
When Doña Elena arrived in Corralejo there were only a dozen houses. There was no electricity and the fridges ran on gas. On the island 6,000 people lived by exchanging potatoes for fish . She was the first woman to drive a car. Also she the first to bathe in a bikini . Many still remember that day. "Even poor Mr. Alfredo, who has Alzheimer's, reminds me of it," he tells me nostalgically. Doña Elena, half French, half Argentine, never left the island because “here I do what I want, dress how I want and have breakfast in front of the sea ”. Every day, she is woken up by surfers who stand at the door of her house to study the best way to enter the sea. Doña Elena lives in Punta Elena.
* This article is published in the April 83 Condé Nast Traveler magazine. This number is available in its digital version for iPad in the iTunes AppStore, and in the digital version for PC, Mac, Smartphone and iPad in the Zinio virtual kiosk (on Smartphone devices: Android, PC/Mac, Win8, WebOS, Rims, iPad). Also, you can find us on Google Play Newsstand.
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Walking around the island of Lobos