Cofete Beach Fuerteventura

I am not really a beach person, I quickly get bored, an hour is usually quite long enough  and I think that the invasive nature of sand is completely incompatible with the intimate nooks and crannies of the human body.  In selecting a favourite beach however this one wins hands down!

Cofete beach on Fuerteventura, which is one of the Canary Islands, which I visited on 21st November 2001.

Cofete is a small village in the south-western part of the Jandia peninsula in Fuerteventura and nearby it has a sandy windswept Atlantic facing beach that is about five kilometers long so gloriously empty that every person on it gets about a thousand square metres of  space all to themselves.  The beach is not really suitable for safe bathing and the advice is that you shouldn’t swim here unless you are Shiwan Ye or Michael Phelps because of the pounding waves, dangerous tides and the strong currents.

There is something curiously mysterious about it, deserted, solitary, lonely, and brooding away in the background are the eight-hundred metre high mountains of Jandia that seem to separate it from the inhabited holiday side half of the island.  The weather is almost always breezy, the waves are very high and the beach appears breathtakingly eerie but nevertheless beautiful.  There are never many people on the beach because it is so inaccessible and there are no lifeguards to rely on in an emergency.

To get there it is necessary to drive over twenty kilometres of track that in some places only allows for single file traffic.  Some of the passing places have steep drops to the side, and the journey can only realistically be tackled in a jeep or four-wheel drive vehicle and believe me it is a really uncomfortable journey, but one worth making nevertheless.  The route there goes through the very pretty Punta Pesebre, the Playa de los Ojos (Eyes beach), which is difficult to access, and the fishing port of Puerto de la Cruz before the lovely Playa de las Pilas.

If you want to sunbathe without any clothes on then this is the place to do it.   The beach is permanently deserted and there is enough private space to stretch out and enjoy the sun on the parts that it does not normally reach!  Some of the people on the beach were doing beach exercises this morning and I began to speculate about what were the three most dangerous athletics events for a naturist and I decided that they would just have to be the high jump, the pole vault because you certainly don’t want your exposed bits and pieces dangling about in mid-air and most of all, especially for a man, hurdling, the thought of the potential for painful injury makes my eyes water!

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More Beaches:

Ambleteuse, France

Galicia Blue Flag Beaches

Cofete Beach

Mwnt Beach, South Wales

Albufiera

Portimão, Carvoeiro, Praia Vale de Centianes and Silves

Portugal, Beaches and a Sunset

Kefalonia, Fiskardo and Assos

Kefalonia, Villages and Beaches

Kefalonia, Lassi and Hotel Mediterranee

Benidorm 1977- Beaches, the Old Town and Peacock Island

Greece 2009 – Ios, Beaches and Naturists

Serifos Psili-Ammos

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A Life in a Year – 31st December, Top Ten Blogs of 2011 (2)

My top ten most hit blog pages in 2011 on my Travel Blog have mostly surprised me.  I say hit blog pages rather than read because I am neither conceited enough of sufficiently naive to claim that a hit equals a read.

None of these blogs are my particular favourites and if I was asked to compile my own top ten list only two of these would be included.

No. 1

Norway, Haugesund and the Vikings.  

I travelled to Haugesund in January and visited a Viking monument and blogged about it.  This post has had 8,900 hits which is nearly 6,000 more than the post in second place.  7,200 hits have been recorded from the single word ‘Vikings’ in various search engines!  I have concluded that this is because there are a lot of people using the search engines to find content about the Minnesota Vikings American Football Team and they are probably disappointed when they come across my page about a wintery day spent next to the North Sea in Norway. Without any shame I have exploited this opportunity by adding a paragraph about the Minnesota Vikings to the blog.

No. 2

Krakow, Wieliczka Salt Mine

2,930 hits. I posted this in April 2010 after returning from a visit to Krakow in Poland.  It was a good trip but I am not sure why so many people would hit on it.  It is not as interesting as my trip to Auschwitz or the Crazy Mike Communist Tour.

No. 3

Greece 2010, The Colossus of Rhodes

2,415 hits.  This is a post that records the penultimate day of my holiday to the Greek Island of Rhodes in September 2010.  I previously posted a page about the visiting the Colossus in 1999 but it has just not attracted the same amount of interest.

No. 4

 Royal Garden Party

2,135 hits.  This one has always been popular especially around the Spring and Summer when invitations to the Royal Garden Party are going out and when people are wondering how to get one or what to wear if they have one.  I am not surprised that this is in the Top Ten!

No. 5

Pula, Croatia

1,965 hits.  A bit of a mystery to me how this one gets so many visits.  I have blogged two or three times about Roman Amphitheatres – Rome, Arles, Merida, Segobriga and about larger Croatian cities at Dubrovnik and Split but this one gets the hits and I don’t know why?  The Pula is the national currency of Botswana so perhaps they are intended as exchange rate enquiries?

No. 6

Cofete Beach

1,790 hits.  My favourite beach at Cofete on the island of Fueteventura in the Canary Islands. Not really surprised by this one because it had a picture of a lady with no clothes on and thousands of people seem to be looking for pictures of naked ladies on a beach!

No. 7

Mount Vesuvius

1,685 hits.  A bit of a surprise because this is the account of a day trip to Mount Vesuvius whilst on a holiday to Sorrento in 1976 with my dad. From my memories of the same holiday I posted several blogs about visits to Capri, Naples, Pompeii, The Amalfi Drive and Rome but these have only achieved a handful of hits between them.

No. 8

Norway, Europe’s most Expensive Country

1,585 hits.  This was a second blog about my trip to Haugesund in January 2011. It contains some interesting facts and figures which might explain the number of hits that it has received but I am not really convinced that this is the reason unless top European economists were using it for research puposes!

No. 9

Love Locks and the Ponte Vecchio, Florence

1,370 hits. This one has consistently received a high number of hits and I cannot explain why.  It is an unremarkable blog about a day trip and visit to the Italian city of Florence.  I would have expected my blog about the Leaning Tower of Pisa to get more hits than the Ponte Vecchio, although there seems to be a lot of restaurants called Ponte Vecchio and this might explain it?

No. 10

Spartacus, Freedom Fighter or Bandit?

1,330 hits. I have posted a number of historical blogs but this is the one that has generated the most interest – perhaps because of the US TV series.  Not as good, in my opinion, as my posts about Spain’s national hero – El Cid!

If you have read one of these blogs or any of the 640 others on my site ‘Have Bag, Will Travel’, then Thank you very much!

A Year in a Life – 21st November, Cofete Beach Fuerteventura

I am not really a beach person, I get quickly bored and I think that sand is completely incompatible with the intimate nooks and crannies of the human body.  In selecting a favourite beach however this one wins hands down!

Cofete beach on Fuerteventura, which is one of the Canary Islands, which I visited on 21st November 2001.

Cofete is a small village in the south-western part of the Jandia peninsula in Fuerteventura and nearby it has a sandy windswept Atlantic facing beach that is about five kilometers long so gloriously empty that every person on it gets about a thousand square metres of  space all to themselves.  The beach is not really suitable for safe bathing and the advice is that you shouldn’t swim here unless you are Sharon Davis or Duncan Goodhew because of the high waves and the strong current.

There is something curiously mysterious about it, deserted, solitary, lonely, and brooding away in the background are the eight-hundred metre high mountains of Jandia that seem to separate it from the inhabited holiday side half of the island.  The weather is almost always breezy, the waves are very high and the beach appears breathtakingly eerie but nevertheless beautiful.  There are never many people on the beach because it is so inaccessible and there are no lifeguards to rely on in an emergency.

 

To get there it is necessary to drive over twenty kilometres of track that in some places only allows for single file traffic.  Some of the passing places have steep drops to the side, and the journey can only realistically be tackled in a jeep or four-wheel drive vehicle and believe me it is a really uncomfortable journey, but one worth making nevertheless.  The route there goes through the very pretty Punta Pesebre, the Playa de los Ojos (Eyes beach), which is difficult to access, and the fishing port of Puerto de la Cruz before the lovely Playa de las Pilas.

If you want to sunbathe without any clothes on then this is the place to do it.   The beach is permanently deserted and there is enough private space to stretch out and enjoy the sun on the parts that it does not normally reach!  Some of the people on the beach were doing beach exercises this morning and I began to speculate about what were the three most dangerous athletics events for a naturist and I decided that they would just have to be the high jump, the pole vault because you certainly don’t want your exposed bits and pieces dangling about in mid-air and most of all, especially for a man, hurdling.  Imagine slapping your dangly bits into the cross beam every ten metres or so, the thought of it makes my eyes water!