Gran Canaria: Maspalomas Sand Dunes
After a couple of walks in the Gran Canaria mountains, we decided it was time to do a bit of sightseeing and visit the Maspalomas Sand Dunes. The dunes are famous for being a ‘mini desert’, in certain places all you can see is hill upon hill of sand.
We parked near Maspolomas and walked over the bridge towards the sand dunes. The dunes appeared to be fenced off so we walked through a gate and went right. That turned out to be a camel stable so we went back and this time turned left.
We walked for ages around a line of worn out no entry signs and then into the shrubby part of the dunes. The trees help retain sand and stop it from blowing away.
Things went downhill from here. Spain is very liberal regarding nudity at coastal beaches, and it is legal to walk around stark naked away from the main holiday resorts. The nudist areas of the beach are clearly marked on the map and aren’t that big, but that doesn’t mean you won’t walk around a dune to find naked people strolling around without a care in the world. A lot of them aren’t carrying anything so how they expect to get home I have no idea!
I’ve annotated a map to depict just how careful you have to be:
Your route should start at Hoten Riu Palace Oasis and roughly follow the green arrow. The red hashing is the risky area. We walked through the shrubby area and still found nudists, I suspect that both beaches use it as an exit point – nothing like a bit of convenient camouflage enroute to the car.
ANYWAY
The dunes themselves were stunning. We had a lot of fun jumping off the top of the high ones, though the sand wasn’t as slidey as we hoped. It would probably work better with a sledge.
The dunes were formed by sand from the bottom of the ocean during the last ice age. Wind blew the sand towards the coast of the island where it piled up in the huge dunes we see now. The building of holiday resorts encircling the dunes has disrupted the wind pattern and experts worry that the dunes will turn to pebble within the next 100 years.
