Fuerteventura vs Lanzarote: Kitesurf or Dive?

by Yannick SchrothSep 5, 20266 min read

Corralejo, Fuerteventura, one of the two islands, not both. Photo: Thomas Tolkien, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

What each island's list is made of

The split is not an accident of sampling. Corralejo sits at the north tip of Fuerteventura with Flag Beach and the dunes on one side and the strait to Lobos on the other, which is why the kite and windsurf schools are there. Costa Teguise is a dive base on a coast with easy year-round entries, which is why almost every business on it is a dive centre.

How much a listing here is worth

Nothing about Spain is like Egypt or Portugal. There is no compulsory register for a dive centre or a kite school in the Canaries, so what we can show you is membership of voluntary bodies: SSI for diving, IKO for kitesurfing, VDWS for wind. A business in one of those directories has an affiliation the body itself publishes, and that is all it has. A business missing from all three may be unaffiliated, affiliated to a body that publishes no list, or simply not found by us.

So read the counts as a shape rather than a score. All thirteen at Corralejo and all fifteen at Costa Teguise carry an entry you can open, so the affiliation can be checked at the source. It does not mean anyone inspected them. Nobody did.

Fuerteventura or Lanzarote: which to pick

Fuerteventura if the wind is the point. Corralejo is where the kite and windsurf schools are, and the dive centres there are a sideline rather than the reason to come. Lanzarote if you are diving: Costa Teguise carries nearly twice as many centres, and they are what the town is built around.

If you want both in one trip, they are a 30-minute ferry apart, and nothing about either list argues for choosing an island and staying on it.

The weather is not the difference. Two met stations say so.

These islands are sixty kilometres apart and get compared on climate, which turns out to be the one axis on which they are almost indistinguishable. Spain's met agency publishes standard values for both airports over the same 1981–2010 period:

• Annual mean temperature: 21.1 °C at both. Identical to the decimal.
• Annual rainfall: Fuerteventura 98 mm, Lanzarote 111 mm. Both are deserts; June, July and August record 0 mm on both islands.
• Annual sunshine: Fuerteventura 2,836 hours, Lanzarote 2,986. A difference of about twenty-five minutes a day.
• Rain days of 1 mm or more: 15.7 against 19.0 a year. Cloudless days: 68.7 against 72.5.

If you are choosing between them on weather, you are choosing on nothing. What does differ is what each island is formally designated as, and the sea is where the gap opens.

Lanzarote has been a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve since 1993: 129,310 hectares total, of which 90,610 are land and 38,700 sea, just under a third marine. UNESCO describes it as of “volcanic origin, with vast lava fields known as malpaís and a profusion of craters in Timanfaya National Park”. Population 145,084.

Fuerteventura was designated in 2009 and is far larger: 354,268 hectares, of which 166,432 are land and 187,836 sea. More than half of that reserve is water. UNESCO notes that the island's “western coastline extends for more than 100 km and is free of human intervention”, that its highest peak is Pico de la Zarza at 807 m, and that its main habitats include “the largest desert and semi-desert in Europe”.

That is the real choice. Lanzarote's designation is older and mostly about the land you drive across; Fuerteventura's is newer, nearly three times the size, and majority sea, a hundred kilometres of undeveloped west coast being the part that matters if you are here for the water.