Cofete: the wild beach at the end of Fuerteventura

Fuerteventura is the Canary island people buy for its beaches, and the strange
truth is that its best one is the hardest to reach. I first saw Playa de
Cofete on postcards: a huge sweep of bare sand under a wall of mountains, not
a building on it. It looked like an advert for a country that does not exist.
We went to check.

Getting there is the filter. The tarmac gives up in the island's far south,
and the last stretch runs on an unpaved road over the ridge, cactuses on the
verges and dust behind the car. Then the pass opens and the postcard turns
out to be underselling it: the Jandía mountains drop straight to a beach that
runs for kilometres, and the scale of it makes the few parked cars look like
crumbs.

There is nothing there, which is the point. No promenade, no loungers, one
tiny hamlet, and at the far end a lonely villa with a wartime legend nobody
has settled: Villa Winter, built in the 1940s for a German engineer, and the
subject of stories the island has been telling ever since. We drove out to
it, then gave the day to the beach itself.

One honest limit: this is the open Atlantic, and it does not behave like the
resort coasts. We swam carefully or not at all, and you should assume the
same. Cofete is a walking-and-staring beach first.

For contrast, we had just spent two nights by Corralejo's Grandes Playas in
the island's north, where the sand is endless and the swimming is easy. That
is the Fuerteventura most visitors get. Cofete is the one they came for
without knowing it.

The road in, where it fits in a week, and the day it pairs with are in the
guide.