Packing and hoping for the best didn’t work out so well. I forgot my shorts. A mistake I bitterly regretted in the extremely humid weather today. More wind and showers forecast, so more tourism.

After a walk down to the port and old town of Puerto del Carmen, we drove out to Yaiza, which is claimed to be the prettiest village in Spain. It’s not. Spectacular setting yes, but the village is pretty nondescript and nothing out of the ordinary, even by Lanzarote standards. I could certainly name 15 Spanish villages off the top of my head that are nicer.

Our drive to El Golfo took us around the edge of the volcanic national park and in contrast to yesterday’s green landscape, today’s colours were all black, red and ochre. We walked up to the higher view point of the acid green lagoon and then went to look at the village of El Golfo, drink a coffee and explore the black sanded beach. The breakers on the waves were huge. We were so impressed with the lava patterns, colours and sea that we drove round to be able to walk up to the lake as well. Stunning.

Next stop was the ‘boiling pots’ of Los Hervideros, which are caves, inlets and natural bridges made of basalt. We watched the sea crash in, around and through them. Las Salinas (where they make salt by drying out salt water), was interesting enough, but we decided to drive to the southern most tip of the island to the lighthouse near Playa Blanca. There were obviously big development plans in the area, as there are hundreds of new (but empty) houses, building sites and roads that go nowhere in the area. It seems that Spain’s building boom crashed here too.

I find uniform housing estates with hundreds of identical houses really depressing so we drove off to Playa Blanca. I thought it was quite nice, but Geoff didn’t think too much of it. We did manage to meet up with Marc and Isabel and finally managed to celebrate her birthday with a sumptuous fish dinner on one of the seaside restaurants.

See photos of today.

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