Corralejo und Dunas de Corralejo
Corralejo is filled with colour and bustle, like anywhere where tourism
races ahead to fast and the infrastructure is unable to keep up.
Most of the shops and restaurants are concentrated along the main street,
whose western end opens out into the Plaza and which ends in a confusion
of narrow one-way streets towards the harbour. The little sandy bays in
the centre are now hardly ever used as moorings for the townspeople’s
fishing boats. Instead, they have become playgrounds for the children
of the holiday-makers enjoying their holidays on the terraces at the water’s
edge or on the shady main square.
Towards the east, more and more holiday complexes are springing up, and
obviously some of them are quite a distance from the beach. Directly behind
the town lies the Corralejo nature park, with its dream beaches and wandering
dunes, where strictly speaking, building is illegal. The only legitimated
exception are the Hotels Tres Islas and Oliva Beach, which went up in
the late 1960s (before a nature protection order was put on the land)
and which can therefore provide a picture book panorama from all their
windows, in all eternity. Even so, around the two hotels more and more
holiday settlements are advancing, metre by metre, along the sandy ground
towards the sea.
Corralejo 15 years ago
In the west of Corralejo is the original centre of the town, consisting mainly of architecturally very simple houses, some with shops on the ground floor. The old church gave way to a post-modern building more than ten years ago, today standing between a sports ground and a school.
When you finally arrive at the harbour, either along the bypass or through the maze of one-way streets, a harmonious scene awaits you. There is a new harbour building with a cafeteria and ferry ticket office, yachts and smaller fishing boats at the quayside, and across on the other side the centre of Corralejo shows you its most attractive side, the one facing the sea.
Car ferries to Lanzarote depart every hour. You can enjoy the half hour crossing in a soft seat, with a drink or a snack, or watching television.
You can book a daytrip on a glass-bottomed
boat, or a three-island tour, or go on a deep-fishing trip, where you
can either join or watch.
At the western edge of the town is the sea water desalination plant. A
couple of kilometres further on, on the track to El Cotillo, you can see
where the electricity cable linking the island with Lanzarote runs into
the sea.
