Green Canary
Por Donde vas Fuerteventura, with its refrain ‘Where are you going, with your lorries of cement’, popular on the island during the 1970s, bemoaned the sudden upsurge of building on the last of the Canary Islands to be developed for mass tourism. The singer, Agustin Martinez, now in his late 50s, still grieves for the island he knew when he was growing up. ‘Then, the port, Corralejo, was a tiny fishing village, with sand drifting through its narrow streets,’ he says. ‘Today, it has big hotels, and is a mass tourism resort.’
A further-education teacher, but also owner of a casa rural, a small hotel set in a restored traditional farmhouse, Martinez is, however, optimistic about more recent changes on the island. In 2009, UNESCO awarded Fuerteventura biosphere status in recognition of both its natural assets and the efforts of its inhabitants to develop a low-impact tourism industry on the island.
Biosphere reserves are large-scale studies for demonstrating sustainable development on a regional scale, and Martinez hopes that the award will secure the island’s future as a high-quality sustainable-tourism destination. ‘Hopefully, uncontrolled speculation will cease,’ he says with a broad smile, ‘and nature at last may have a chance again.’
But there has also been a boost for the island’s natural environment from an unexpected quarter. The economic crisis, which has hit Spain harder than most European countries, put a sud-den brake on tourist developments on Fuerteventura, and many new building projects have been shelved.
According to Tony Gallardo, the director of the Department for the Environment, the island is now poised to become an example of what carefully managed environmental planning can do. ‘Our future lies with everything sustainable,’ he tells me. ‘The biosphere concept is all-inclusive: from food through tourism and even utilities. In Corralejo, for example, all of the mains water now comes from desalination plants – powered by electricity that is wind generated.’
And wind certainly isn’t in short supply. The island, the second-largest of the Canaries, is swept by the northeast trades, giving a relatively cool year-round climate, despite the Moroccan coast being only 100 kilometres away. The least densely populated of the archipelago, with a population of about 80,000, it’s geologically the oldest, with a spectacular landscape of ancient volcanic cones, dry steppe and sand dunes and, with more than 320 kilometres of coastline, some of the
longest beaches in Europe.
Volanic views
On a bright February day, I set out to walk the recently completed Gran Recorrido or GR, one of the island’s newest biosphere ecotourism projects. More than 150 kilometres long, the GR 131 extends from the northernmost tip on Isla de Lobos, an island nature reserve formed by a long-extinct volcano, to Fuerteventura’s southern end, passing through the entire range of landscapes to be found here.
On the first day, after taking the ferry into Corralejo from Isla de Lobos, I climb to one of the most spectacular viewing points on the entire trail at the Calderón Hondo. Standing on the lip of the crater, which is some 600 metres wide, I can see the high green peaks of Lanzarote to the north, and the dry interior of eroded volcanic formations and steppe to the south.
Scrambling down on the slippery picón – a black sand or gravel of fine lava blasted from the crater above some ten million years ago – I follow the trail as it skirts the mountain of Tindaya, sacred to the islands’ original inhabitants, the Majoreros, whose ancestors are thought to have been Berbers from the African mainland.
Later that afternoon, I enter Vallebrón, a spectacular wide valley lined with small terraces like smudged contour lines of stone, painstakingly built into the hillsides as far as the eye can see.
At its peak at the turn of the 20th century, this area was busy with small farms on which corn, lentils, maize and even mulberries were grown. Indeed, at that time, the island was practically self sufficient in food.
An old man, tending his carefully tilled garden by the trail greets me with a cheerful ‘¡Hola!’ Telling me with some pride that he’s over 90, Miguel Darias has no hesitation when I ask him about the old days on the island. ‘¡Duro!’ he says. ‘Life was very, very tough.’
Miguel used to grow corn in the valley and said that droughts were the farmers’ worst enemy. ‘I would have to take the camel kilometres to find water,’ he says, gesturing down the valley. ‘And there would be a queue of people waiting at the well.’ At one point, it got so bad that he and many other islanders had to leave the island to find work, but he returned as soon as things improved.
I ask him what he thinks of the Gran Recorrido, which passes within metres of his front door. He gives a short laugh at the idea of people walking for pleasure, but applauds the idea of the island being kept as it was. ‘The old ways were good – we grew our own food,’ he says. ‘Today, everything is imported, which can’t be right. But it’s peaceful up here as it always was – that’s what we want to keep on the island.’
Down on the farm
Two days later, I reach the halfway point at Betancuria, a pretty town of whitewashed houses clustered around a church. The oldest European settlement on the island, it was built during the 15th century, well hidden in a valley from the onslaught of marauding pirates. Here, on a small hill, José Hernandez makes award-winning cheeses, and his state-of-the-art dairy parlour is busy with goats being milked by machines.
Over a coffee, Hernandez extols the virtues of Fuerteventura and its untouched natural habitats. ‘People here still have firm contacts with their country background and work their own land – unlike other islands of the Canaries, where many gave up on their farms more than a generation ago.’
Hernandez is a firm supporter of the agroturismo movement, where tourists stay on working farms or in converted farmhouses. ‘It is the future,’ he says. ‘We need to make people realise the beauty of the interior, and that Fuerteventura is far more than just sun and beach.’
Later that evening, a trifle footsore and sunburnt, I gratefully down my bags in the cool courtyard of the Agroturismo La Gayria. The carefully restored buildings, set around a quadrangle of single-storied stone houses, were once the blacksmith’s shop and forge for the nearby village of Tiscamanita.
The owner, Pepe Santana, a dynamic man in his 50s, comes to join me for a cold beer after feeding his donkeys and horses in the paddock close to the house. ‘Here in Fuerteventura, we came very close to destroying the very uniqueness of the island, in our mad rush to follow what the other islands of the Canaries were doing – with building large resorts and thinking that mass tourism was the answer,’ he tells me as the sun sets over the ancient volcanoes in front of the house.
‘Thankfully, with the biosphere status, at last there is a rising consciousness among islanders about what we have. Initially, people were sceptical – thinking it was yet another talking shop. But now they can see that things are really changing.’
Santana is the president of the island’s association of casas rurales, which is promoting the restoration and conversion of disused farm buildings into tourist accommodation. ‘Many visitors come to Fuerteventura on full- or half-board packages,’ he says. ‘Some never leave their hotels. That way they rarely explore the interior of the island, or sample local gastronomy. The kind of sustainable tourism that we provide here involves everyone in the local economy, from the local baker to restaurants. It brings jobs back into the countryside.’
Dividing line
Two days later, under a hot sun, I come to the six-kilometre-plus sand dunes that separate the northern part of the island from the long peninsula of the southern end. Once the dividing line of the two kingdoms ruled by the Majoreros before European conquest in the 15th century, the crest offers wide views to the sea on both sides of the island. To the west, immense deserted beaches and high cliffs stretch as far as the eye can see. The area is inaccessible by road, and there are plans to turn this 140 kilometres of rugged coastline into a national park.
Taking a swig from my water bottle, I notice that the trail here is paved with blocks of stone laid, I discover later, by Republican prisoners of war interned here in labour camps following the Spanish Civil War. I follow a long line of immense wind turbines, and an hour later, it comes as a shock after so many days of peaceful country walking to emerge onto the busy sea front in Jandia, where phalanxes of hotels stand in front of the sea.
I remember Santana saying that if every hotel were full in Jandia, the huge beach that fronts the town wouldn’t be big enough for everyone. ‘That sort of development is unsustainable,’ he had told me. ‘We should never have allowed it.’
Turning turtle
I have a rendezvous at the beginning of my final day with Tony Gallardo, at the little fishing port of Morro Jable, just south of Jandia. Until they were hunted to extinction on the Canaries at the end of the 19th century, loggerhead turtles used the empty beaches of the rugged west coast I had seen the day before as nesting grounds. The gently shelving sands provided the perfect conditions for the heavy female turtles to dig their nests, and for the tiny, vulnerable hatchlings to crawl down to the sea some two months later.
Now, Gallardo is heading an ambitious project to reintroduce the species here by bringing freshly laid eggs from the nearest colony in the Cape Verde islands and placing them in purpose-built nests at Cofete, a remote beach under high cliffs.
I find him at the base camp in the port, where there’s a series of blue tanks, full of tiny swimming loggerhead turtles, about seven to 15 centimetres long. ‘In nature, only one out of 1,000 baby turtles survives to adulthood,’ he says, as he holds up the largest loggerhead of the collection, which has been kept for four years so that it can be fitted with a tracking device before release. ‘Here, we keep them until they are large enough to have a fair chance – which is sometimes two or three years.’
The first group was released three years ago, and now, each year, more are put back into the sea every summer. ‘The female turtles, it seems, can recognise the scent or taste of the sand from the beaches on which they were hatched, and return to nest there, rather like salmon returning to their streams,’ he tells me. ‘We hope that within ten or 15 years – the time it takes for an adult turtle to become sexually mature – we will see turtles nesting here again as they have done for many millennia.’
I wish him well, pick up my bag and head off for the start of the final 20 kilometres walking to the end of the island. ‘You see,’ he says as we part, ‘it’s rather symbolic of the whole biosphere plan – a long-timescale project that will take many years to achieve, and perhaps a bit of a gamble, but if all goes as planned, it’s part of the restoration of Fuerteventura’s long-term natural sustainability.’
Fuerteventura - co-ordinates
When to go
The best time to visit Fuerteventura is in spring, when the hills are covered in wildflowers and lush green pasture, but with more than 3,000 hours of sunshine per year and an average annual temperature of 22°C, the island is a good year-round destination.
Getting there
Ryanair, Thomson, Monarch and easyJet all fly direct to Fuerteventura. There are both express and ordinary ferries from Corralejo to Lanzarote (journey time from 30 minutes).
Further information
To learn more about travel to Fuerteventura, visit the websites of Turespaña (www.spain.info) and the Fuerteventura Tourist Board (www.fuerteventuraturismo.com). For more on casas rurales, visit www.ecoturismocanarias.com/fuerteventura. And to track Chusy, a radio-tagged loggerhead released in 2009, visit www.seaturtle.org.
May 2011
A further-education teacher, but also owner of a casa rural, a small hotel set in a restored traditional farmhouse, Martinez is, however, optimistic about more recent changes on the island. In 2009, UNESCO awarded Fuerteventura biosphere status in recognition of both its natural assets and the efforts of its inhabitants to develop a low-impact tourism industry on the island.
Biosphere reserves are large-scale studies for demonstrating sustainable development on a regional scale, and Martinez hopes that the award will secure the island’s future as a high-quality sustainable-tourism destination. ‘Hopefully, uncontrolled speculation will cease,’ he says with a broad smile, ‘and nature at last may have a chance again.’
But there has also been a boost for the island’s natural environment from an unexpected quarter. The economic crisis, which has hit Spain harder than most European countries, put a sud-den brake on tourist developments on Fuerteventura, and many new building projects have been shelved.
According to Tony Gallardo, the director of the Department for the Environment, the island is now poised to become an example of what carefully managed environmental planning can do. ‘Our future lies with everything sustainable,’ he tells me. ‘The biosphere concept is all-inclusive: from food through tourism and even utilities. In Corralejo, for example, all of the mains water now comes from desalination plants – powered by electricity that is wind generated.’
And wind certainly isn’t in short supply. The island, the second-largest of the Canaries, is swept by the northeast trades, giving a relatively cool year-round climate, despite the Moroccan coast being only 100 kilometres away. The least densely populated of the archipelago, with a population of about 80,000, it’s geologically the oldest, with a spectacular landscape of ancient volcanic cones, dry steppe and sand dunes and, with more than 320 kilometres of coastline, some of the
longest beaches in Europe.
Volanic views
On a bright February day, I set out to walk the recently completed Gran Recorrido or GR, one of the island’s newest biosphere ecotourism projects. More than 150 kilometres long, the GR 131 extends from the northernmost tip on Isla de Lobos, an island nature reserve formed by a long-extinct volcano, to Fuerteventura’s southern end, passing through the entire range of landscapes to be found here.
On the first day, after taking the ferry into Corralejo from Isla de Lobos, I climb to one of the most spectacular viewing points on the entire trail at the Calderón Hondo. Standing on the lip of the crater, which is some 600 metres wide, I can see the high green peaks of Lanzarote to the north, and the dry interior of eroded volcanic formations and steppe to the south.
Scrambling down on the slippery picón – a black sand or gravel of fine lava blasted from the crater above some ten million years ago – I follow the trail as it skirts the mountain of Tindaya, sacred to the islands’ original inhabitants, the Majoreros, whose ancestors are thought to have been Berbers from the African mainland.
Later that afternoon, I enter Vallebrón, a spectacular wide valley lined with small terraces like smudged contour lines of stone, painstakingly built into the hillsides as far as the eye can see.
At its peak at the turn of the 20th century, this area was busy with small farms on which corn, lentils, maize and even mulberries were grown. Indeed, at that time, the island was practically self sufficient in food.
An old man, tending his carefully tilled garden by the trail greets me with a cheerful ‘¡Hola!’ Telling me with some pride that he’s over 90, Miguel Darias has no hesitation when I ask him about the old days on the island. ‘¡Duro!’ he says. ‘Life was very, very tough.’
Miguel used to grow corn in the valley and said that droughts were the farmers’ worst enemy. ‘I would have to take the camel kilometres to find water,’ he says, gesturing down the valley. ‘And there would be a queue of people waiting at the well.’ At one point, it got so bad that he and many other islanders had to leave the island to find work, but he returned as soon as things improved.
I ask him what he thinks of the Gran Recorrido, which passes within metres of his front door. He gives a short laugh at the idea of people walking for pleasure, but applauds the idea of the island being kept as it was. ‘The old ways were good – we grew our own food,’ he says. ‘Today, everything is imported, which can’t be right. But it’s peaceful up here as it always was – that’s what we want to keep on the island.’
Down on the farm
Two days later, I reach the halfway point at Betancuria, a pretty town of whitewashed houses clustered around a church. The oldest European settlement on the island, it was built during the 15th century, well hidden in a valley from the onslaught of marauding pirates. Here, on a small hill, José Hernandez makes award-winning cheeses, and his state-of-the-art dairy parlour is busy with goats being milked by machines.
Over a coffee, Hernandez extols the virtues of Fuerteventura and its untouched natural habitats. ‘People here still have firm contacts with their country background and work their own land – unlike other islands of the Canaries, where many gave up on their farms more than a generation ago.’
Hernandez is a firm supporter of the agroturismo movement, where tourists stay on working farms or in converted farmhouses. ‘It is the future,’ he says. ‘We need to make people realise the beauty of the interior, and that Fuerteventura is far more than just sun and beach.’
Later that evening, a trifle footsore and sunburnt, I gratefully down my bags in the cool courtyard of the Agroturismo La Gayria. The carefully restored buildings, set around a quadrangle of single-storied stone houses, were once the blacksmith’s shop and forge for the nearby village of Tiscamanita.
The owner, Pepe Santana, a dynamic man in his 50s, comes to join me for a cold beer after feeding his donkeys and horses in the paddock close to the house. ‘Here in Fuerteventura, we came very close to destroying the very uniqueness of the island, in our mad rush to follow what the other islands of the Canaries were doing – with building large resorts and thinking that mass tourism was the answer,’ he tells me as the sun sets over the ancient volcanoes in front of the house.
‘Thankfully, with the biosphere status, at last there is a rising consciousness among islanders about what we have. Initially, people were sceptical – thinking it was yet another talking shop. But now they can see that things are really changing.’
Santana is the president of the island’s association of casas rurales, which is promoting the restoration and conversion of disused farm buildings into tourist accommodation. ‘Many visitors come to Fuerteventura on full- or half-board packages,’ he says. ‘Some never leave their hotels. That way they rarely explore the interior of the island, or sample local gastronomy. The kind of sustainable tourism that we provide here involves everyone in the local economy, from the local baker to restaurants. It brings jobs back into the countryside.’
Dividing line
Two days later, under a hot sun, I come to the six-kilometre-plus sand dunes that separate the northern part of the island from the long peninsula of the southern end. Once the dividing line of the two kingdoms ruled by the Majoreros before European conquest in the 15th century, the crest offers wide views to the sea on both sides of the island. To the west, immense deserted beaches and high cliffs stretch as far as the eye can see. The area is inaccessible by road, and there are plans to turn this 140 kilometres of rugged coastline into a national park.
Taking a swig from my water bottle, I notice that the trail here is paved with blocks of stone laid, I discover later, by Republican prisoners of war interned here in labour camps following the Spanish Civil War. I follow a long line of immense wind turbines, and an hour later, it comes as a shock after so many days of peaceful country walking to emerge onto the busy sea front in Jandia, where phalanxes of hotels stand in front of the sea.
I remember Santana saying that if every hotel were full in Jandia, the huge beach that fronts the town wouldn’t be big enough for everyone. ‘That sort of development is unsustainable,’ he had told me. ‘We should never have allowed it.’
Turning turtle
I have a rendezvous at the beginning of my final day with Tony Gallardo, at the little fishing port of Morro Jable, just south of Jandia. Until they were hunted to extinction on the Canaries at the end of the 19th century, loggerhead turtles used the empty beaches of the rugged west coast I had seen the day before as nesting grounds. The gently shelving sands provided the perfect conditions for the heavy female turtles to dig their nests, and for the tiny, vulnerable hatchlings to crawl down to the sea some two months later.
Now, Gallardo is heading an ambitious project to reintroduce the species here by bringing freshly laid eggs from the nearest colony in the Cape Verde islands and placing them in purpose-built nests at Cofete, a remote beach under high cliffs.
I find him at the base camp in the port, where there’s a series of blue tanks, full of tiny swimming loggerhead turtles, about seven to 15 centimetres long. ‘In nature, only one out of 1,000 baby turtles survives to adulthood,’ he says, as he holds up the largest loggerhead of the collection, which has been kept for four years so that it can be fitted with a tracking device before release. ‘Here, we keep them until they are large enough to have a fair chance – which is sometimes two or three years.’
The first group was released three years ago, and now, each year, more are put back into the sea every summer. ‘The female turtles, it seems, can recognise the scent or taste of the sand from the beaches on which they were hatched, and return to nest there, rather like salmon returning to their streams,’ he tells me. ‘We hope that within ten or 15 years – the time it takes for an adult turtle to become sexually mature – we will see turtles nesting here again as they have done for many millennia.’
I wish him well, pick up my bag and head off for the start of the final 20 kilometres walking to the end of the island. ‘You see,’ he says as we part, ‘it’s rather symbolic of the whole biosphere plan – a long-timescale project that will take many years to achieve, and perhaps a bit of a gamble, but if all goes as planned, it’s part of the restoration of Fuerteventura’s long-term natural sustainability.’
Fuerteventura - co-ordinates
When to go
The best time to visit Fuerteventura is in spring, when the hills are covered in wildflowers and lush green pasture, but with more than 3,000 hours of sunshine per year and an average annual temperature of 22°C, the island is a good year-round destination.
Getting there
Ryanair, Thomson, Monarch and easyJet all fly direct to Fuerteventura. There are both express and ordinary ferries from Corralejo to Lanzarote (journey time from 30 minutes).
Further information
To learn more about travel to Fuerteventura, visit the websites of Turespaña (www.spain.info) and the Fuerteventura Tourist Board (www.fuerteventuraturismo.com). For more on casas rurales, visit www.ecoturismocanarias.com/fuerteventura. And to track Chusy, a radio-tagged loggerhead released in 2009, visit www.seaturtle.org.
May 2011
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