Together with Morro Jable, the “calm coast” is the cradle of tourism on the sandy beaches of Jandia. Since the late 1960s, the Dehesa S.A. company has been selling sites for building solitary and tranquil private houses, first to a German architect, who invented the name of the place, then to other Germans, Britons and Scandinavians.
The first hotel was the Solyventura, built in 1977. Because the infrastructure was lacking, the town developed relatively slowly despite its dream beaches, until 1984, when the road from Puerto del Rosario to Morro Jable was asphalted, Costa Calma was connected to the electricity network and its own sea-water desalination plant went into operation. The private houses that were built at the beginning are now penned in by holiday complexes and hotels of various categories.
There are bars, restaurants and shops in the large hotels in Costa Calma, and clustered together in Centros Comerciales.
Since 1986 the town has had its own sea-water desalination plant (potabilizadora), which provides many of the hotels and holiday complexes with water. The waste water is piped to either a central or a house sewage plant and reused as “agues verde”. The result is flowering hotel gardens and the green zone (zona verde) of palms and Canary pines along the main road, so unusual on Fuerteventura.
In the mid-1990s a new intensive building phase began in Costa Calma. New hotels, larger than the old, rose up in an attempt to accommodate as many guests as possible in as little space as possible, and with the future increase in visitors in mind, more shopping centres were planned and approved. Condominiums in high-rise blocks and bungalow complexes are put on sale before they have even been completed. The “calm coast” is increasingly turning into a tourist centre with accommodation for both the mass trade and more exclusive tastes.