Fuerteventura is an island of special landscapes that trap and make us fall in love. Spectacular beaches, volcanos smoothed by the wind, vertical cliffs, capriciously carved by an Atlantic Ocean, sometimes rough, sometimes lovely…

Just by watching the power of the sea in this Atlantic Ocean that sometimes hits our coast and, in some other occasions, gives us quiet tides reminds us constantly the strength of nature, which in Fuerteventura reaches its highest extent.

The effort of the man to dominate the power of the sea took him to invent lighthouses to guide the ships approaching the coast. These sentinels have been projecting their relieving light for centuries.

Fuerteventura, a coastal island in whole, sometimes smooth, sometimes rough, elongated and surrounded by the capricious Atlantic, has 6 lighthouses, several of them located in corners offering spectacular landscape.

Let’s make a tour on four of these lighthouses, a different route to discover the island that takes us to idyllic beaches and steep cliffs with salty wind.

Faro del Tostón

Five kilometres away from the north of El Cotillo, exactly in Punta Ballena, we find this lighthouse that houses the museum of “Pesca Tradicional”, which shows the fishing habits and tradition of the island. It opened in 1897 and it took about six years to be built. This lighthouse, together with the lighthouse of Punta Pechiguera (Lanzarote) and the lighthouse of Punta Martiño (Lobos island) mark the strait of La Bocaina, separating Fuerteventura from Lanzarote. An interesting point of the lighthouse of El Tostón is that the writer Agustín Pallarés Padilla was born there. Apart from offering very special dusks, the area is lovely, rich in birds and specially charming due to the contrast between the rough pounding waves, on the one hand, and the quiet natural lagoons surrounding it, on the other hand.

La Entallada Lighthouse

In the eastern coast, more towards the south, we find the lighthouse of La Entallada, a peculiar building, maybe one of the most singular andt beautiful lighthouses in Spain, located on an about two-hundred-meter cliff, also the nearest point of Fuerteventura to the African continent, which is less than 100 kms far. For this reason, it has a long distance radar and thermal cameras. It was built in 1954, being one of the last lighthouses built in The Canary Islands to be inhabited. This is why it’s made up of the tower and three dwellings where lighthouse keepers used to live and work in ancient times. This lighthouse offers, apart from spectacular views to the sea, privileged views over the Natural monument “Cuchillos de Vigán”, a mountain range which is about 500-meter high and has a protected natural area of great interest due to the fossil fauna and because they’re home to some of the most threatened birds in The Canary Islands (the Egyptian vulture, an osprey…).

Punta de Jandía Lighthouse

At the most southern point, within the “Parque Natural de Jandía”, in the most uninhabited and desert area of the island, we find this lighthouse, one of the oldest ones in The Canary Islands, which started to work in 1864. It used to guide the ships sailing from Europe to the ports of the Spanish and French Occidental Africa, and also those which approached the island through this route; it also indicated the presence of dangerous shallow waters at about 800 meters away from it. In ancient times, the lighthouse keeper ensured its smooth functioning, leading a most solitary life in such a desert and uninhabited setting; it’s a few metres away from Puertitito de la Cruz, but this little village was made up of just a few huts which were inhabited two months a year. This desert landscape, El Parque Natural de Jandia, is one of the most special sceneries in Fuerteventura.

Punta de Pesebre

To the south of Fuerteventura, in the western side, also in Peníncula de Jandía, we find Punta Pesebre. It’s a marker tower which owes its name to a transcription mistake in the “majorera” toponymy, because actually its name is “Presebe”, which means barnacle in The Canary language, named after a huge rock of the area that looked like a barnacle. The people from La Península making the maps understood it should be “Pesebre” because they didn’t know the original name. The views from these extreme point of Fuerteventura on the western coast are spectacular.

Three more lighthouses light up the majorera coast: Morro Jable lighthouse, located in Punta del Matorral, whose major beauty is its environment; the lighthouse of Puerto del Rosario, located in Punta del Gavioto; the third one, the most special of them all, is the wonderful Faro de Martiño, in the beautiful Lobos Island we have already talked about on other occasions.