Ajuy

This weekend we took out a little rental car and went on a few outings around Fuertevetura. One of those was to a place named Ajuy, which, I must say sounds quite shocking for a Russian ear. Especially when you say something like “I am in Ajuy” in Russian.

Anyway. Prior to this visit, I was convinced that the road to Ajuy is extremely bad; not at all sure why by now. The small road that goes to the village itself (FV-621) is not that narrow and doesn’t behave like a snake; a somewhat trickier stretch is on the bigger road FV-20 between Tuineje and Pajara; or, if you are mad enough to take FV-30 bewteen Betancuria and Pajara, that should provide you with a good adrenalin influx. Still, if your car is powerful enough, it’s not really that bad, especially with automatics.

Village itself is tiny, and I found the little population dynamics table in the wikipedia article quite sweet. There are a few restaurants, and the beach is large-grained black sand. When we were there, the waves were quite strong but a few people were bathing. I must say it looked quite dangerous. There were a few drownings this year, but people still will go into the waves. Local autorities are not willing to put up signs, because they believe it will damage the tourist trade. I believe they are shooting themselves somewhere sensitive.

Looks pretty though.

The reason to go there is the “natural monument” — the shore, mixture of soft limestone and harder rocks, got eroded into interesting shapes, and there are caves a short walk away.

The presence of “natural monument” was announced with a few signs; or rather used to be announced, as the writing faded almost completely under the sun. The only thing you could read were the words “Natural monument”, end of message.

The caves are not very deep, you could see the other end from the mouth of each of them.

People (including my kids) build those little cairns to mark the fact that they’ve been there. Some of them are placed quite high on the walls; I am not entirely sure how that is achieved.

To get to the caves, you take a path along the limestone cliff. Down into the sea, the views are quite interesting, because parts of the cliff fell down there a white ago; and now the uneven surface of the ocean bottom leads to water moving in strange ways, as turbulent water does, forming little temporary waterfalls and vortexes.

We didn’t go into the water, but waves still managed to do some damage, taking away one of Kirill’s flip-flops. And walking barefoot on the black sand heated up by Fuerte sun is no joke, I can tell you.

Photos of Atlantic at Shutterstock