Fuerteventura, 2022
My first days in El Cotillo were drenched in sand. La Calima, literally translated as haze, is the phenomenon that occurs when strong winds bring heat and dust from the Sahara Desert across the ocean channel that separates the Canaries from Africa, and it was in full swing my first few days there.
Already stunned by the desert, an environment I had spent no time in, the Calima only made a Martian landscape even more disconcerting. Fuerteventura for sure lives up to its name, literally translating as strong wind.
At first, I avoided the onshore trade winds by ducking to the breaks south of El Cotillo. Typically, the surfer half of my couple friends I was meeting up with expounded for days on how perfect it was for the month before I got there. When the first swell of my time on the island arrived the wind switched southeast, lighting up the break rich north of the island, I understood braving this alien island’s environmental harshness in the hopes of waves (and before the surfers arrived, sun).
The north of the island had 3 hubs; the more tourist-y shopping oriented Corralejo (also had some gems), the laid back, maybe even hipster-y Lajares, and sleepy El Cotillo, these winds not once, but twice pushed me to take the almost 3 hour drive to the far southwest of the island to the Peninsula de Jandia to hide from the onshore trades, sleeping in my rental car trunk twice. Out on this southwestern barren point of the island, home to a tiny one-store no-stoplight town the other-worldliness of this place peaked. It was as if I had been taken out of time.
