Maspalomas Dunes
Dunas de Maspalomas
Interesting facts
- Roughly 45,000 cubic metres of sand are estimated to vanish from the dune system each year, much of it ending up on the sea floor.
- Sediment studies show the sand feeding the dunes arrives from Playa del Inglés to the east, then marches south-west across the field toward Maspalomas beach.
- Tiny shells of foraminifera mixed into the sand let geologists trace exactly which beach supplies the dunes and where the supply has dried up.
- Researchers found the mobile dunes drifting westward without new ones forming behind them, a sign that the field is slowly running out of sand.
- Beach kiosks along Playa del Inglés once blocked the wind that carries sand inland, and their number has been cut back since 1995 to help the dunes.
- A restoration project from 2018 to 2019 moved more than 60,000 cubic metres of dredged sand onto Playa del Inglés and marked about 8 km of authorised paths.
- The neighbouring Maspalomas lighthouse, first lit on 1 February 1890, is about 56 metres tall and the tallest masonry lighthouse in the Canary Islands.
- The reserve averages around 80 mm of rain a year, with roughly 259 sunny days and only about 13 fully overcast ones.
Why it is worth it
At the southern tip of Gran Canaria the island suddenly turns into a small Sahara. The Maspalomas Dunes cover about 404 hectares between the resort towns and the Atlantic: ridges of pale gold sand, some around ten metres high, that the north-east trade winds push forward a few metres every year, so that the shapes never repeat. There is no other dune system of this kind on the island. The sand itself is a relic of the last ice age, when the lowered sea exposed the marine shelf and the wind blew its sediment onto the coast.
The reserve is more than sand. On its western edge lies La Charca, a brackish coastal lagoon where stilts, little ringed plovers, coots and moorhens nest and migrants such as little egrets, grey herons, whimbrels and even flamingos stop on their way between Europe and Africa. Beside it grows a palm grove of native Canary Island palms, where the Gran Canaria giant lizard is common. Among the dunes live sand-dwelling insects, some found nowhere else, with close relatives across the water in Africa. The climate explains the desert look: rainfall is well under 100 mm a year, falling on only ten to fifteen days.
The dunes have been protected since 1987 and are now classed as a special nature reserve; they were among the finalists of the "12 Treasures of Spain" competition. They are at their most beautiful in the low light of early morning or late afternoon, when every ripple throws a shadow and the Maspalomas lighthouse, standing about 200 m from the sand, catches the sun. Sea, lagoon, palms and dunes sit side by side within a short walk, which is what makes this small reserve so unusual.
Getting there
The dunes lie between Playa del Inglés, about 1.6 km away, and Maspalomas in the municipality of San Bartolomé de Tirajana. Gran Canaria Airport (LPA) is about 28 km to the north-east along the motorway that follows the east coast.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Maspalomas Dunes are sand dunes located on the south coast of the island of Gran Canaria, Province of Las Palmas, in the Canary Islands. A 404-hectare (1,000-acre) area of the municipality of San Bartolomé de Tirajana, they have been protected as a nature reserve since 1987. They were one of the contenders in the 12 Treasures of Spain competition.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
27.74280, -15.58290per Wikidata