CORRALEJO Walking Tour || Fuerteventura - Canary Islands |4k|

CORRALEJO Walking Tour, Fuerteventura, Canary Islands, Spain.
Corralejo is a town and resort located on the northern tip of Fuerteventura, one of the Canary Islands, facing the smaller islet of Lobos. It is in the municipality of La Oliva. It is surrounded to the north and east by the Atlantic Ocean, by dunes to the south and by arid desert land to the west that leads to the western coast and El Cotillo. Once a traditional fishing village, the town has grown significantly and today is one of the two main tourist towns on the island of Fuerteventura. Thanks to the large expat population, the town has a diverse population that varies from the local Spaniard, to the Italian, Irish, British, German and Finnish people who have settled in the resort.

The area has 7 miles (11 km) of fine sand starting 2 miles (3.2 km) outside of Corralejo, alongside some smaller bays across the coast. In addition, there are several miles of sand dunes located nearby, which have been designated as a nature reserve. The waters around Corralejo are clear and an intense shade of blue, but are affected by strong currents. The town's beaches are somewhat more sheltered and have a band of volcanic rock along the shoreline.

Corralejo has existed for most of its history as a humble and unimportant fishing village, where a handful of poor fishermen worked long hours to provide for their families. In the early 1970s, with its extraordinary beaches and expansive dunes, the tourism that had arrived in the south of the island in the 1960s began to venture north. Corralejo had very humble beginnings as a tourist resort. John Mercer, who visited the then village in the early 1970s as research for a book on the island, left a record of the humble first steps Corralejo took into the tourist industry:

"The village, however, unattractive and quite without interest. Why anyone should wish to spend any time there until its development is over and the dust and noise have died down is not clear.. a visitor or a purchaser can wake up any day to find a house or a hotel starting a metre or two away." -John Mercer, Canary Islands: Fuerteventura. 1973.

Mercer prophetically said that Corralejo would "long be simply a spreading building site, dominated by concrete mixers, lorries, floating discarded cement bags, falling rubble and staring whistling oafs." Tourism continued to develop in the town through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, reaching a peak in the 2000s. Hotels, apartments and villas sprang up. Many British and Irish tourists fell in love with the resort and felt happy to relocate there permanently. In the decades following Mercer's account of Corralejo's tourist development, that same growth of the tourist industry saw the population of Corralejo and the La Oliva region grow significantly. In the 1975 census the population of La Oliva was 2,900, with that population now just above 25,000.

Throughout the 2010s, the town has grown significantly, with new businesses constantly opening and closing down. The town is also progressively being pedestrianized, starting with the town's main street around 2017 (however this decision to pedestrianize streets has received its share of criticism from the townsfolk). Vandalism has also risen with the long-abandoned replica of the Santa Maria galleon in the old "Europa Baku" theme park having been burned down by vandals in May 2019. Despite this, however, tourism is still going strong, with thousands visiting the town every year.

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