Corralejo

The coast around Corralejo was where the Norman-French conquest of Fuerteventura began. In 1402 Jean de Béthencourt's expedition, which had already built a fort on neighbouring Lanzarote, sent Gadifer de la Salle and a small party across the strait; they landed in the arid, thinly populated north and explored for eight days. A second landing that October used the islet of Lobos, two kilometres offshore, as a base to hunt seals for food and skins, until a mutiny on Lanzarote left La Salle's men stranded there without water until they were rescued.

The town itself is young. Oral tradition says it was founded around 1810, though others date the first proper settlement to the 1850s; its first residents, from Lanzarote, Galicia and Portugal, built houses from local stone, and the name may come from the use of the area as a coastal cattle pen. For a century it remained a small fishing cove, dependent on La Oliva, with about a hundred people and only around eleven surnames as late as the 1950s. In 1925 the fishermen built a chapel to Our Lady of Mount Carmel together, each placing a piece; it was replaced by a modern church in the 1980s.

Tourism reached the north of the island in the early 1970s, drawn by the beaches and dunes, and the village became a building site; the writer John Mercer described it in 1973 as dust, noise and concrete mixers. Growth continued through the following decades and peaked in the 2000s, with many British and Irish visitors settling for good.

Corralejo is a resort with a fishing village at its heart, and its character comes from the mix of people who have settled there. Alongside Canarians, the town has large communities of Italians, Irish, British, Germans and Finns, which gives it an international feel alongside the Spanish tapas bars of the old town.

The sea and the wind shape local life. Fuerteventura's trade winds and winter swells make the exposed north coast popular with surfers all year, Corralejo is a well-known spot for windsurfing and kitesurfing, and schools and rental shacks line the town. The town is also home to the Onexe Fuerteventura paddleboarding club, the most successful stand-up paddleboarding club in Spain, and to the football club CD Corralejo.

The island's older traditions still surface. The fishermen's chapel of 1925 is remembered as a work the whole village built together, and the townspeople's link to the sea runs through their history, from the long days fishing the north coast to the queues at the windmills when calm days left them unable to grind gofio. Fuerteventurans are called majoreros, a word of indigenous origin also given to the island's famous cheese.

Corralejo had about 18,700 inhabitants in 2023, which makes it the second-largest town on Fuerteventura after the capital, Puerto del Rosario. It belongs to the municipality of La Oliva, whose population has grown from about 2,900 in 1975 to more than 29,000 in 2023, almost all of it because of tourism, and the town offers around 20,000 beds to visitors.

Tourism is the economy: hotels, apartments, villas, restaurants, bars, shops, water-sports schools and the ferries to Lanzarote and Lobos. Through the 2010s the town grew quickly, with new businesses constantly opening and closing. The main street was pedestrianised from about 2017, a change that drew criticism from some residents, and vandalism has become a concern; in 2019 the replica galleon of an abandoned theme park was burned down.

The pace follows the wind and the seasons. Winter brings northern European visitors and long-stay residents, summer the Spanish holidaymakers. Days revolve around the beaches and the dunes, evenings around the old town's bars and restaurants, and the ferries to Lanzarote keep the port busy through the day.

Fuerteventura's cooking is simple, and like the other Canary Islands it relies heavily on fish. Papas arrugadas, wrinkly potatoes boiled in their skins in very salty water, come with mojo, a sauce of olive oil, local peppers, garlic and paprika, and puchero canario is a meat stew. Fish is prepared in traditional ways: pejines are salted fish, jareas sun-dried fish, and sancocho is salted fish such as grouper, corvina or sama, boiled and served with mojo, potatoes or gofio, the island's flour of roasted grain. Mussels and limpets gathered on the coast are popular.

Goat is the main meat, roasted or stewed, and goat's milk makes majorero, the island's best-known cheese. Firm and pale, sometimes with a little ewe's milk added, it is sold with a natural rind rubbed with oil, coated in paprika or rolled in roasted gofio, and holds a European protected designation of origin.

In town, most bars and restaurants are in the old town near the harbour and serve Spanish food and tapas, and some specialise in seafood and paella. Every Sunday a Canarian market is held at the El Campanario shopping centre.