A Walk Through Fuerteventura

By David Collins

Fuerteventura is well known to tourists for its beaches and its windsurfing. But there is much more to it than this. This book is a passionate and authoritative account written by someone who really knows the island.

It describes a walk over the mountains and remote desert landscapes of the island, referring in particular to wildlife and places of historic interest, but also including personal anecdotes from visits over more than thirty years. The book provides an enthusiastic account of the island, its wildlife and history as seen through the eyes of its most passionate exponent.

“If you’d like to know more about Fuerteventura and its wildlife, just follow David Collins on his journey across the island. A privileged few have had David as their guide on Fuerteventura. Now everyone can enjoy his knowledge and passion, which are weaved into this enjoyable travelogue.” Chris Durdin, Honeyguide Wildlife Holidays

“This book is filled with interesting anecdotes and information revealing the true spirit of Fuerteventura and its flora and fauna” Rod Casey, Villaverde, Fuerteventura

• Language: English
• Publisher: Amolibros
• Release date: May 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9781912335237

David Collins

David Collins is one of the UK’s most respected investigative reporters. In 2011, he became the youngest journalist in the history of the British Press Awards to win News Reporter of the Year for helping police convict the serial killer Levi Bellfield for the murder of Milly Dowler. He joined the Sunday Times as an investigative reporter in 2015, joining the Insight team. He is currently northern correspondent for the Sunday Times based in Manchester.

Book preview

A Walk through

Fuerteventura

David Collins

Published as an ebook by Amolibros at Smashwords 2020

Qué nombre tan sonoro, alto y significativo!

Fuerteventura? Es decir, ventura fuerte.

What a name, so resonant, high and significant!

Fuerteventura? That is to say, great venture.

Miguel de Unamuno, 1924

No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength.

Jack Kerouac

No hay camino, se hace camino al andar.

There is no road, the road is made by walking.

Antonio Machado

Caminar es atesorar

To walk is to gather treasure

Old Spanish saying

Copyright © David Collins 2014

First published in 2014 by Houbara House

Published as an ebook by Amolibros 2020 | www.amolibros.com

The right of © David Collins to be identified as the author of the work has been asserted herein in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Cover photography by David Collins

Front cover is the volcanic cone of Montaña Arena from the south

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This book production has been managed by Amolibros

www.amolibros.com

eBook production

by Oxford eBooks Ltd.

www.oxford-ebooks.com

About this book

Fuerteventura is well known to tourists for its beaches and its windsurfing. But there is much more to it than this. This book is a passionate and authoritative account written by someone who really knows the island.

It describes a walk over the mountains and remote desert landscapes of the island, referring in particular to wildlife and places of historic interest, but also including personal anecdotes from visits over more than thirty years. The book provides an enthusiastic account of the island, its wildlife and history as seen through the eyes of its most passionate exponent.

If you’d like to know more about Fuerteventura and its wildlife, just follow David Collins on his journey across the island. A privileged few have had David as their guide on Fuerteventura. Now everyone can enjoy his knowledge and passion, which are weaved into this enjoyable travelogue. Chris Durdin, Honeyguide Wildlife Holidays

This book is filled with interesting anecdotes and information revealing the true spirit of Fuerteventura and its flora and fauna Rod Casey, Villaverde, Fuerteventura

About the author

David Collins is a lifelong naturalist and a professional ecologist. He graduated from Royal Holloway College, University of London, where he completed an honours degree in Biological Sciences in 1979. This was followed by two years studying the behaviour and ecology of the rare and endangered Houbara Bustard in Fuerteventura for which he was awarded a Master of Philosophy degree. He has subsequently visited the island on many occasions to lead wildlife holidays, to study bird migration and wildlife, and on holidays with his family. He is co-author of the definitive guide to birdwatching in the Canary Islands and has also written popular articles on the Canary Islands for birdwatchers.

His varied career began with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, where he contributed both to the society’s research and conservation planning activities. Since then he has worked as an environmental consultant, as senior ecologist for major infrastructure projects, and as environmental advisor both to the Environment Agency and the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs.

He is a Chartered Environmentalist and a founder member of the Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management (CIEEM), of which he is a past member of Council.

Contents

List of Boxes

Cueva del Llano

Desert shrubs

Agaves in Fuerteventura

Common small birds

Birds of the shore

Corralejo dunes

Lichens

Euphorbias and Echiums

Hunting and the EU Birds Directive

Lizards

La Oliva church

Casa de los Coronelles

Common butterflies

Chiffchaffs in Fuerteventura

The façade of Pájara church

Defensive buildings

Cacti and exotic succulents

The Río Palmas valley and Our Lady of the Rock

The Ginny Plant

Pico de la Zarza

Miguel de Unamuno

List of Plates

Book Cover – The volcanic cone of Montaña Arena from the south.

Photographs, between Chapters 3 and 4

Photographs, between Chapters 23 and 24

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to my friends Kate Watters and Chris Durdin who were kind enough to read through the manuscript and provide constructive editorial comments. I have no doubt that the book is significantly better for their efforts. I am also grateful to my wife Eiluned, who provided helpful comments on various drafts, but more importantly provided the moral and practical support needed both to undertake the walk and complete the book.

I am grateful to Ray Purser for permission to use his superb photograph of the Cream-coloured Courser. All other photographs are by the author. Thanks also to Richard Unthank who digitised the maps.

Dedication

In memory of my father, who always encouraged and supported my interest in natural history.

One

Introduction

Fuerteventura is the second largest of the Canary Islands. This book describes my attempt to walk from one end of it to the other, incorporating some of its highest mountains. As far as I know, nobody had tried to do this before. It is also an account of the island’s natural history and places of historic interest, based on knowledge built up over more than three decades of visits. My aim has been to write a readable account of the island, and to provide more detail than can be found in guide books. With the exception of one or two long out-of-print books, there is nothing similar in the English language.

I first set foot in Fuerteventura on 30th March 1979. Little did I know then what an impact the island would have on the rest of my life. I was an impressionable twenty-one-year old student, taking part in an expedition organised by the International Council for Bird Preservation (ICBP), now BirdLife International. Our task was to estimate the population of the Houbara Bustard, a rare bird of the desert fringes.

It seems incredible, embarrassing almost, that we called ourselves an expedition, as today Fuerteventura is a popular tourist destination. But in those days Fuerteventura was a harsh land of poverty and open desert landscapes. Life on the island was harsh and facilities were basic except in the main towns and the few isolated tourist hotels. Villages had no mains electricity, and goats were still the mainstay of a predominantly agrarian economy. Three weeks on a sparsely populated semi-desert island studying rare birds was certainly wild adventure for me.

Now, life on the island is generally a great deal more comfortable. Unfortunately, though, development has inevitably come at a cost. All too often, what used to be an awe-inspiring wilderness of naked lava is now covered in apartments. The drive to accommodate as many tourists as possible has sometimes overruled sensitivity to the natural environment.

There has also been a dramatic change in the availability of water. Where once there was desperate shortage and every drop was used carefully, tourism has required the development of expensive desalination facilities, which have made it possible to lavish water on sub-tropical landscaping on a scale that would previously have been unthinkable. Some of the islands resorts now even have golf courses.

Despite the head-long rush to develop the island for tourism, however, wilderness and tranquillity can still be found, and the island’s fascinating natural history is still largely intact. I hope that those who read this book will share the pleasure that the island and its wildlife have given me over more than three decades, and will perhaps be encouraged to visit the island to explore it themselves.

*

Fuerteventura is the closest of the Canary Islands to Africa. At its nearest point it is about 100 kilometres from the western coastal fringe of the Sahara. Like all the islands it is volcanic in origin, but it is older than the others, and much older than the western islands. The violent volcanic activity that created the island began twenty million years ago, and lasted for eight million years. By then, the island was something like modern day Tenerife, with mountains 3,000 metres high. But today the island is just the eroded remains of those mountains. Its highest point, at Pico de la Zarza, is only 812 metres above sea level (807 metres according to older maps).

After a long period of relative quiet, there was a resurgence of volcanic activity five million years ago, with smaller eruptions continuing over the last three million years. This recent period of volcanism has, however, been on a much smaller scale. The volcanic cones and lava fields, mainly in the north and centre of the island, bear testimony to that recent period of upheaval and form a distinctive part of the landscape. In places, solidified lava flows are evident, but more often volcanic bombs cover the lava in jagged rocks. The cones themselves are formed by accumulation of pyroclasts: volcanic ash that is mostly deposited down-wind, so one side of each cone has a higher rim than the other. These lands of lava, rock and ash are known as malpais, literally ‘badlands’: a good name for territory that is treacherous to cross and cannot be farmed.

There is an interesting museum about the volcanic history of the island at Cueva del Llano, between Corralejo and Villaverde (Box 1).

*

Above all else, Fuerteventura is a thirsty island. Most areas receive only 50 – 150 mm of rain per year on average, and the coastal fringe is even dryer. Almost all of the rain falls between November and April, and there is virtually none at all in summer. There is also much variation between years. In the wettest years there may be 500 mm in the high mountains and even very arid areas such as the east coast may get more than 200 mm. In contrast, even the highlands receive less than 50 mm in the worst years. In the past, years of low rainfall led to almost complete crop failure, and both livestock and people suffered terribly.

In keeping with its aridity, Fuerteventura has a desert landscape. Its hills and plains are generally bare; the only obvious vegetation over the vast majority of the island is a sparse scattering of dull green saltwort (Box 2). In the few areas where there is enough moisture to allow cultivation, palms and fig trees form oases in the harsh landscape. After the intermittent heavy rains the hillsides flush green with annual grasses, and for a few weeks the landscape is dotted with the colourful flowers of annual herbs.

*

Today, travel to Fuerteventura is simple and easy. There are direct flights from all over Europe, and passenger ferries operate a regular service across the shallow waters between Lanzarote and Corralejo, the main resort at the northern end of the island. A hundred years ago, getting to Fuerteventura was much more difficult. The first impressions of those few seasoned travellers who made it to the island must have been very different. In the last year of the nineteenth century, when the pioneer bird photographer Henry Harris visited Fuerteventura, recently introduced steam ships provided the inter-island service. His comments about travel to the island in years before the steamships came into service are telling.

The journey now is very different to what it was some ten years ago, when the enthusiastic naturalist – for no one not interested in natural history would go to Fuerteventura – must take his chance in the rough seas which are often to be encountered between these islands, trusting himself and his belongings to some antiquated schooner which might very well take a week over the voyage.

Fourteen years later, in May 1913, during his British-Museum-sponsored expedition to the Eastern Canary Islands, David Bannerman, who was one of the leading ornithologists of the day, joined a similar small steamer from Las Palmas in Gran Canaria. When his ship arrived at the island’s capital (then Puerto Cabras or ‘Goat Port’, the pre-tourist era name for Puerto del Rosario) it anchored offshore and they were taken ashore in small boats. Both baggage and passengers were then loaded onto camels. For the latter purpose wooden frames were set on the camels so that one passenger could ride on either side.

When the island began to attract tourists in the 1960s, the airport south of Puerto del Rosario had yet to be built. Planes from Las Palmas and Arrecife landed at the old military airport at Los Estancos, half-way between Puerto del Rosario and Tetir. In those days many travellers still used the inter-island ferry, which took around two and a half hours to ply between Arrecife and Puerto (as the capital is generally called). This was cheaper, but not a good option for those without good sea-legs, as the sea to the east of the islands is deep and there is often a big swell.

*

In common with almost everyone who visits the island these days, my first view of Fuerteventura was from the air. In the late 1970s, the airport at Puerto was really just an airfield with a short runway that could only accommodate small planes. There were no direct flights from England then, so we had flown to Arrecife on the nearby island of Lanzarote, and had to stay there overnight before catching the plane to Fuerteventura. True to the expeditionary tradition (and to save money), we camped on volcanic grit by the roadside somewhere inland from Arrecife. The following day we made the short hop to Fuerteventura in a small and rather ancient Fokker. From above, the island looked utterly barren, just rounded mountains with a few volcanic cones, and apparently no signs of life save for a few low buildings and an empty road. I had never been anywhere remotely like it before.

We touched down at the smallest airport I had ever seen. Beside the runway was a large shed that served as the airport building, complete with a dingy bar where a few locals whiled away the hours in a smoke-filled fug. The utter barrenness of the plains near the airport certainly didn’t inspire me, and this is certainly the dreariest part of the island. Neither, unfortunately, was my first day on Fuerteventura a particularly auspicious one. After landing, we took taxis into Puerto del Rosario, where we met up with three local bird experts who were part of the Grupo Ornithologico Canario. They had arrived earlier from Tenerife on the inter-island ferry. To celebrate our arrival on the island and to get to know each other a little better we had a drink in a bar near the quay. In the excitement of it all, I was stupid enough to leave my day sack at the bar, and that was the last I saw of it. Fortunately, I lost nothing of particular importance: my passport and the little money I had was in my jacket, and my trusty binoculars were, as ever, round my neck.

On that first day in Fuerteventura I was immensely excited at the prospect of spending three weeks in a place that was so utterly different to anything that I had known before, watching Houbara Bustards and a range of other desert birds that I had previously only dreamt of seeing. I had no idea, of course, that twenty-nine years later I would be back there with the intention of walking from one end of the island to the other.

*

Box 1: Cueva del Llano

Anyone who is interested in the volcanic history of the island would do well to visit the museum at Cueva del Llano. This is to the west of the road between Corralejo and La Oliva. The museum is at the entrance to a hollow underground lava tube, more than half a kilometre long. Regular tours take groups of visitors along part of the tube. Most tours are in Spanish, but there are English tours at certain times, and the museum provides information in English.

The cave is home to a unique spider-like creature Maiorerus randoi, which is blind and un-pigmented as a result of living for hundreds of thousands of years in the dark. It is so unlike anything else in the world that it has been given its own genus, dedicating it to the Majoreros, as the people of Fuerteventura are called. But don’t worry if you are an arachnophobe, you won’t see it down there: it is rare and confined to the humid depths of the lava tube where visitors are not allowed to go.

Box 2: Desert shrubs

Most of the desert shrubs that are scattered across the dry hillsides and plains are species of saltwort. The commoner species include Salsola vermiculata, 1 with its beautiful red-winged fruits, and the dull grey-green Chenoleoides tomentosa. There are two other common shrubs scattered amongst the saltwort. The first is a member of the daisy family, and is nothing more than a tangled mass of harmless dull green spines that are too weak to damage the skin. This is Launaea arborescens, locally known as aulaga. It has a characteristic strong musty smell, is virtually leafless and is one of the most characteristic plants of the island. After rain it produces a mass of yellow flowers not unlike a sowthistle. The other is Lycium intricatum, a member of the nightshade family locally known as espino (literally ‘the spiny one’). It is a sprawling plant with nasty spines rather like those of blackthorn. The plant is leafless during dry periods, but produces small leaves and purple flowers after rain. These develop into little red berries that are quite pleasant to eat, and are a valuable source of food for some of the island’s birds. Another plant that is very obvious beside roads and around cultivated areas is the Shrub Tobacco Nicotiana glauca, an introduced plant with a woody stem several metres long on which are borne clusters of tubular yellow flowers.

---

1 Plants mentioned in the text are listed in Appendix 2, which provides the common names (where available), and brief notes on appearance and distribution in Fuerteventura

Two

The Fuerteventura Houbara Expedition

My inclusion in the Fuerteventura Houbara Expedition certainly had an element of luck to it. At the time I was a third-year ecology student at Royal Holloway College, London. Our plant geography course included a week studying the flora of Tenerife, which gave me a basic grounding in the vegetation of this fascinating island in the Canary archipelago. The bustard enthusiasts within the ICPB, who were trying to get a group of experienced birders together for the Fuerteventura Houbara expedition, needed someone who could also provide botanical support. A keen birder I most definitely was, and although the plants of Tenerife and Fuerteventura are very different, my knowledge of Canary Island plants was deemed to be sufficient for me to be accepted into the team. I was thrilled, partly at the thought of seeing exciting new birds, and partly because of my love of wild places.

Our base for the three weeks was at La Oliva, a large village of low, whitewashed houses that serves as the administrative capital of the north. It is halfway between the east and west coasts, on the southern edge of a great lava field of jumbled rocks. Rising above the village is Montaña Arena, which is one of the island’s more impressive volcanic cones.

We were lodged in empty buildings with no electricity on the very edge of Arena’s lava field. We slept in sleeping bags on the floor of the largest room, and at night, after an exhausting day out in the sun and wind, wrote up our notes by the light of kerosene lamps.

The buildings had previously been the centre of the government-run sisal industry. Sisal, which is used to make rope, is the dried fibre of the agave, an American plant. At the time of our expedition, agave plantations still covered great swathes of land around La Oliva. The lorry that been used to collect the agaves and take the fibre to the port for shipment was rusting away in the courtyard. Clearly the commercial agave experiment had not been a lasting success (Box 3).

During our three weeks in Fuerteventura, we spent every day walking the plains in search of Houbaras. The Houbara is quite a big bird, about the size of a small goose but with rather long legs, slender build and an elegant posture (Plate 1). It is amazingly good at avoiding detection, and it required a lot of concentration to spot one. We would select a different plain each day, and head out early in the morning with a packed lunch,