Maspalomas, the Desert by the Sea

Once again bound for the Canary Islands, this time it's Gran Canaria. We choose the Tabaiba Princess, a hotel of what is described as the best hotel chain in the Canaries. It's something indescribable: the hall is enormous, plants everywhere, panoramic lifts, the hotel is set in a tropical garden, the grass is such a green that it looks fake. There are no fewer than 6 pools, large and even with an artificial beach, surrounded by lush vegetation, palms of every kind, banana trees, dragon trees; you can stay in the shade even in the water. The food is sublime; the buffet satisfies even the most demanding. The hotel is 1.8 km from Maspalomas beach, but the walk doesn't scare us, so much so that we go back and forth morning and afternoon, then return after dinner towards the shop area near the lighthouse.

You walk along the Barranco de Maspalomas, a river with very high banks and completely dry, a favourite passage for camels; they say that when the water comes here it floods everything (can that be true?). There aren't many plants along the sides of the road, so at midday the sun beats down hard. In practice it takes 20 minutes to reach the sea; this is a deciding factor for anyone staying at the Tabaiba with small children, who are very hard to move away from the pools to undertake a walk like that. Once you reach the beach you glimpse the Charca de Maspalomas, a kind of little lagoon that is a paradise for migratory birds. The beach is more than 10 km long, with equipped beach clubs, lifeguard towers, quite a few nudists and sand of a lovely warm colour, with few dark grains, undoubtedly the widest and most beautiful beach on the island.

Anyone who's an early riser like us manages to get a spot under the only tree on the beach, but strolling along the water's edge is too tempting. The dunes that reach the sea are not immense but they still give the idea of a desert landscape. There's a sign warning you to be careful not to lose your bearings, but seeing the mountains behind you and the sea in front it almost seems like a joke. As for the sea....it's not Lanzarote and not even Fuerteventura; the spectacle here is this desert by the sea.