Ireland day 1240. Wednesday 19 February 2025- Fuerteventura Day 09

Today’s summary	After our bags were collected at 9am, we set out straight away to walk the 18km across the Pared mini-desert to Risco del Paso. Absolutely fabulous walk. Splendid desolation, sand and azure sky. Loved it. Collected at the end by taxi and taken to Costa Calma for overnight accommodation. Dinner in the hotel
Today’s weather	A very brief shower in the morning (hence the rainbow) but otherwise dry and sunny again though some cloud on the coast at Risco del Paso. Moderate northerly wind. Appx 21c

Today’s overview location (The blue mark shows the location of our route)		Close-up location (The blue line shows where we walked) (Click button below to download GPX of today’s walk as recorded, or see interactive map at bottom with elevations corrected): GR131 as walked Day 08 Pared to Risco del Paso

Commentary

Wow! What a day. Any slight disappointments that yesterday might have delivered upon us were quickly forgotten today, with our eighth day’s walking on the GR131, from Pared, to Risco del Paso. It a word it was uplifting.

But first off – breakfast. It was another lovely clear morning in Fuerteventura, and we took advantage of the fine weather to have an alfresco breakfast on the hotel terrace. Then, out of the blue, a shower hit us. Fortunately, the heaviest rain seemed to fall offshore, so we only engaged with a bit of drizzle and a rainbow. A prescient start to the day!

Once Tito the taxi had taken our bags away at 9am, we set off pretty much straight away and headed from La Pared (the town) into La Pared (the desert). “Pared” in Spanish means “wall” and it’s quite appropriate really as, although the name probably refers to an ancient wall which separated the kingdoms of north and south Fuerteventura, it applies equally well to the wide belt of sand which forms a geographical barrier between the north and the south.

It’s a very distinctive area – you can quite easily see it as a yellowish-white band about 12km wide cutting across the satellite image of Fuerteventura on Google Earth. It’s basically a form of raised beach, caused by sand blown up from the shoreline once the trade winds started blowing about 6 million years ago (or at least that’s what the information board at the beginning of the walk said).

Anyway, it’s a fascinating, lonely, place and the GR131 runs right through the middle of it. A bit like the Pajara-to-Cardon section, some walkers opt to skip this stage but that means they miss one of the best stages of the whole walk. In my opinion, anyway. We loved the whole walk. It felt like you were walking on the surface of Mars. A few scrubby plants – even some goats though goodness knows what they found to eat – but mostly just azure sky, sun and sand. And also some interesting geological and botanical finds, as the photos below show.

We were enjoying our Lawrence of Arabia moment so much that it almost seemed a shame when we reached the southern end of the sandy belt and turned east to meet the coast at Risco del Paso. It really is quite remarkable how sharply the end of La Pared is delimited – the bleached white sand merges into the darker basaltic terrain in just the space of a few metres.

We made it to the end of today’s stage by the coast at Risco del Paso by 2:30pm – a full two and a half hours sooner than we expected. After a bit of phoning, we arranged for our taxi to pick us up early and take us on to tonight’s hotel in Costa Calma, about 10km up the coast.

We arrived at the 4* H10 Esmeralda in time to chill out for a moment of two and I even managed a dip in the pool. Remarkably it seemed to be even colder than the sea. I think it must be refrigerated! Needless to say I didn’t stay in it long. Anyway it’s time for dinner now. We are showered and changed and looking vaguely presentable enough to merge seamlessly into the parallel universe of the “normal” holidaymakers who call this rather luxurious residence temporarily their home. I could soon get used to this!

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)


To infinity and beyond	All you need to know about the Pared. It’s quite interesting, actually – especially the geology bit

Yours truly – in action!	Outside our hotel for tonight – H10 Esmerelda in Costa Calma. Very nice

Barrelitos! Fossilised nests from solitary bees who lived here in wetter times – perhaps during the last glaciation. You can almost hear the buzz of those 20,000 year old insects	Lightning never strikes twice? Possibly a fulgurite (a “fossilised” lightning bolt caused when lightning strikes wet sand and fuses the grains together). But more likely actually the cast of a burrow or a root.

Val’s parasitic plant. Past its best – it was probably in full bloom a couple of months ago. Some form or broomrape, probably. It was about 20cm tall it it was hard to see what plant it might have been parasitising as there were none nearby