La Graciosa in summer — 2, Yellow Mountain and walking (a bit)

Amazing color of the Yellow Mountain, Montaña Amarilla

The last time me and Timur went to La Graciosa, the smallest of the inhabited Canary Islands, we only went as far as Playa Francesa, sheltered cove beach where many leaisure vessels anchor for an hour or so. We were not impressed: it was crowded, and there was a pink floating inflatable slide in the water, great way of spoiling beautiful landscape.

This time we wanted to walk a bit more, to get away from the masked crowds, and to try to see the other islands of Chinijo Archipelago from the north shore of La Graciosa. As mentioned in the first post, walking on La Graciosa is not a problem if you don’t mind sand and heat. Distances are ridiculously small and there is no vegetation, so you basically always see where you are and where to go.

North-West of Gran Canaria: Sardina del Norte, Faro Punta de Sardina and rock pools

Small development next to the lighthouse looks Santorini-esque under the hot Canarian sun

By now I walked most of Gran Canaria and liked most of it, too. However, there are still parts of the island of which I am aware mostly because of the photos seen in various social networks. Sometimes I have a feeling people want to keep the most beautiful places to themselves and that is why they don’t explain where they take their photos. If that is the case, they shouldn’t publish the pics in the first place. For me, it works as a challenge, and I imagine I am not the only one.

Beautiful water, isn’t it?

Lanzarote in summer, Playa de Papagayo

Beautiful water. Playa Mujeres

This year’s summer holidays were a bit scrambled for us, due to this and that. To punctuate the month of August we decided to go to Lanzarote, just for three days. We’ve already been to Lanzarote a few times of course. This time, the aim was to check out Playa de Papagayo, Parrot’s Beach, a small cove beach not far from Playa Blanca, and La Graciosa, the smallest inhabited Canary Island, “the eighth one”.

Playa de Güigüí, the secret beach

Impressive cliffs, right?

I suppose Guigui (pardon me for not going into all that umlaut nonsense from this point on*) is Gran Canaria's equivalent of Cofete beach on Fuerteventura. Although it is nowhere as large or as beautiful, it has one very important advantage - you can swim there reasonably safely without being swept into the ocean, never to be seen again.

One disadvantage (although it is debatable if this is indeed a disadvantage) is that Guigui is even less accessible than Cofete. There is no road at all; your choice is either walk or go by boat. Going by boat is expensive; plus, there is absolutely nothing at all on the beach, no bar, almost no shade in the second half of the day, zero, zilch, nada. And, if you decide to extract the maximum value out of the boat ride both ways and stay there for at least three hours you will end up severely sunburned and quite possibly really, really bored.

Vamos a la playa, Oh — ohoh ohoh! Playa de Cofete, Oh — ohoh ohoh!

Cofete! Finally :)

This weekend, 23—24 January, we came to Fuerteventura yet again. We used an excellent Bintazo offer by Binter Canarias *. And we came with a very specific aim in mind — to get to Cofete, a difficult-to-access beach on the windward side of the island. I saw it a couple of times before, but never visited the beach. Kirill never even saw it from the ground level.
Getting there takes some research. The road is quite bad, as you will see later. Soon after you pass the port of Morro Jable, the surfaced road changes to a dirt track, very winding and bumpy. Normal cars can go on it, and will reach the beach eventually, but you are not supposed to drive rental cars on dirt tracks. No one will stop you, but if anything goes wrong, you will pay through the nose. You can walk, but that will be heavy going. I estimate the distance between the car park (where the dirt track starts) and the beach to be about 8 km. Plus you have to go by Cofete pass, which is at about 300 meters above the sea level, so each way will feature 300 meters of both up and down. And there is no shade. Biking is possible, but also strenuous and quite dangerous.
Now that you are sufficiently scared, let me give you a solution to this conundrum.

Invisible fish and the Flag Beach again

Yesterday there was quite a few of those invisible fishes around at the Flag Beach. If you are wondering why I call them invisible, look closely. What you can see very clearly is their shadows, not the fish themselves. Small semi-transparent bodies hovers just above the dark outline.

kites and Christmas lights

Yesterday we went for a walk in the dunes with Yuri. The intention was to go to the "proper" dunes - ones that don't have any vegetation, with nice wind patterns on them, but when we came up to the border of the nature park, we spotted an unusually large group of kites  over Flag Beach. So we turned towards it. Unfortunately, by the time we got there (takes about 25 mins walking), surfers were already closing the shop so to speak - it was getting late.

Flag beach

We've spent happy couple of hours on Flag beach. It's just to the south of Corralejo.

Healing mud of Nin

I was hesitating somewhat before placing this picture, since I don't know those guys, but decided that their privacy is protected enough by their poses and mud layer. Plus, I turned lady's head away. Plus it is a public beach, of course, it's just I am always very hesitant with photos of strangers.

Anyway, what you see in front of you is one of the beaches of Nin. On the map below is the one to the left from the Nin bay entrance (upper left corner). The dark blue shallow lagoon below it on the map is filled with this black sticky stuff, and as you come to the beach, you see plenty of people smeared with it. It's relatively quiet place at the moment, but I strongly suspect that once this large-ish project I just found about is underway, it'll be lot less accessible and a lot busier.

I don't quite understand what the mud is supposed to be healing, but well. Looks like good fun anyway.

Beaches of Nin are nice, though, mud or not. Visually, they not as striking as ones on Fuerteventura, and not at all as clean, but they have shallow sand access to calm water, and that' a definite plus on most beaches in Croatia I've seen so far.



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Spain, Fuengirola beach. Well, you can't see where it is, you have to take my word for is

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