Maspalomas

The thing about Maspalomas that the brochures get wrong is the scale. They show you a tasteful crescent of sand and a lighthouse and you assume it is a nice beach with a bit of dune behind it. Then you walk in from the edge near the Faro, and within ten minutes the resort towers have disappeared behind a ridge of sand, the sea is gone, and you are standing in a genuine dune field — wind-sculpted ridges marching off in every direction, the sand stripped into ripples by the trade winds, your own footprints already softening behind you. It is not large by desert standards, a few square kilometers, but it is large enough to make you briefly and pleasantly unsure which way is out. Lia and I had agreed to “just have a quick look” and lost an hour to it without complaint.

A protected accident of geography

These dunes are a nature reserve, and walking them you understand why they had to be fenced off from the wall of hotels that very nearly swallowed them in the tourism boom. The sand is fine and pale gold, and in the low light of early morning or late afternoon the whole field turns into a study of shadow and ridge that photographers have been ruining their knees over for decades. There is a brackish lagoon, La Charca, at the western edge near the lighthouse, fringed with reeds and weirdly full of birdlife — herons, migrating waders, things that have no business being next to a beach resort, using the wetland as a staging post on the long haul between Europe and Africa. I sat on a bench there at dusk watching the birds and the joggers and an old man feeding something to the ducks, and the contrast between the wild lagoon and the package-holiday machinery a few hundred meters away was the most Canarian thing I saw all week.

Walk it at the right hour

The mistake everyone makes is crossing the dunes at midday, when the sand is scorching and the light is flat and the whole thing feels like a punishment. Go at first light instead. We did it once, walking from the lighthouse end out across the field as the sun came up, and the dunes were cool underfoot, the ridges threw long blue shadows, and we had the whole improbable landscape almost entirely to ourselves apart from one couple practicing yoga on a crest, which I judged silently and then admitted was a reasonable use of the place. The walk eventually delivers you to the beach proper, a wide pale strand running for kilometers, and you can swim off the heat before the day’s crowds arrive.

When to go: Gran Canaria is reliable nearly year-round, but the dunes are best in the cooler, quieter months from October through April, when the midday heat is bearable and the light stays soft for longer. Whatever the season, walk the sand at dawn or in the last hour before sunset — the middle of the day belongs to the resort crowds and the unforgiving glare. Bring water, take nothing from the reserve, and stay off the fragile vegetated slopes, which are doing the unglamorous work of holding the whole thing together.