Why you should visit the Canary Island you’ve never heard of
Volcanoes, low-rise whitewashed villages and daily adventures: overlooked La Graciosa deserves your full attention, says Robin McKelvie
“This is Lanzarote 50 years ago,” says hiking guide Jose, casting his arm over a wildscape devoid of high rises, cars and bustling resorts. I do find sun loungers, but only a lonely trio scattered apologetically on an empty beach. La Graciosa, the “newest” Canary Isle, is an oasis where you won’t just find a bit of peace and quiet – you’ll leave the 21st century spirit-soaringly behind.
You won’t get away with flying here on a cheap flight, unsure of the identikit resort you’re heading to. You have to really want to get to La Graciosa. Work your way up to the very north of Lanzarote and there the isle beckons, still distant across the often fierce Atlantic swell. I bash over on the sturdy local ferry with a sprinkling of islanders and a handful of day trippers, more Spanish than British. La Graciosa has no hotels to speak of, just pensions and apartments. No tarmac roads, either – the Costas this is not.
My first sight of La Graciosa swirls me back to my childhood and the pages of Treasure Island. Fringed by a necklace of bleached white beaches, the sands and scrubland drift inland towards a ribbon of textbook volcanoes, instantly revealing how this speck was formed millions of years ago. With a population that would fit inside one of Tenerife’s megalopolis of hotels – just over 700 inhabitants at last count – it feels lightyears away from the rest of the Canaries. Indeed, La Graciosa only officially became the eighth Canary Isle in 2018. It’s the star of the Chinijo Archipelago, at 700 square kilometres the largest marine reserve in Europe, also comprising the islands of Alegranza, Montana Clara, Roque del Este and Roque del Oeste. More than a third of the world’s cetacean species patrol local waters in this, the EU’s most important oasis for dolphins and whales.
La Graciosa feels pleasantly compact to explore, stretching for five miles south to north and just two and a half miles wide, a total area less than a tenth that of the Isle of Wight. I land in the “capital” of Caleta de Sebo, a low-slung sprinkling of whitewashed, flat-roofed buildings that have more in common with north Africa than mainland Spain – not too surprising as Africa lies less than 100 miles away. Madrid, on the other hand, is almost 1,000 miles distant.
My first sight of La Graciosa swirls me back to the pages of ‘Treasure Island’: fringed by a necklace of bleached white beaches, sand and scrubland drift inland towards a ribbon of volcanoes
Easing through the sandy streets past a trickle of vehicles – a clutch of sturdy 4X4s – I’m trying to make sense of it all when I chance upon the self-declared “Smallest Museum in the World”. It’s certainly the smallest (OK, the only one) on La Graciosa, but it crams in a lot. Here I find out that the island was first inhabited only in 1867, when seven adventurous families moved here to start a fish factory. That went the same way as the planned resort, the naval port and, mercifully, casino. There were even suggestions of a cable car across from Lanzarote. La Graciosa has a habit of just brushing off the grand schemes of man, its sands always eventually drifting over attempts to tame it.
The museum evokes German explorers, Berber pirates and waylaid British sailors, and talks of the lost treasure of Playa de las Conchas. No one bothered to mark the spot with an ‘X’ - fair enough, it’s easy to be distracted by one of the finest beaches in all of the Canaries – and that’s saying something. You can pray for treasure if you like, at the solitary church in Caleta de Sebo, which you stumble out of the museum into.
I eschew praying and resolve to strike out for Las Conchas. There are jeep safaris, but the shopkeeper in the wee shop by the church guides me towards more green transport – she insists that, on La Graciosa, two feet or two wheels is always best. Cycling to Las Conchas is not easy, not when the tracks are little more than dirt, encased in swirling sands, but it proves worth the effort.
Las Conchas is one impressive beach: the island’s rugged northern coast is like nowhere else in Spain I’ve seen. Its rock-studded, surf-savaged sands – graced with the rugged peaks of Alegranza island in the distance – remind me more of the Outer Hebrides than mainland Spain. I’m on a beach that stretches for over half a kilometre, but I’m entirely alone under big Atlantic skies.
Heading back to the world of human company the next day, I hike down to Playa Francesa, to a gentler side of La Graciosa, south of Caleta de Sebo. Here catamarans ease in on day trips, waving at celebrating yachties who chance upon these shores en route to somewhere more famous, and rarely choose to leave in a hurry. I meet a Dutch guy who has done just that.
“How can you not want to lay anchor here? We were heading for Tenerife, but just had to stop. It’s like sailing into a tourist brochure, but this is the real thing,” he beams as we share a couple of biscuits from my pack. There are no noisy bars or bustling restaurants here. Nothing bar cotton-wool white sand and aquarium-clear waters, set within the embrace of a natural volcanic amphitheatre.
Easing back to Caleta de Sebo, I savour another catatonically laidback evening on La Graciosa. It starts with a heart-starting cortado coffee, then a sundowner in the bar by the pier at Pension Enriqueta, where I watch the tour boats leave. I chat to local walking guide Jose, of Blackstone Treks & Tours, over a bone-dry Malvasia wine from just across the water on Lanzarote.
La Graciosa has a habit of just brushing off the grand schemes of man, its sands always eventually drifting over attempts to tame it
Jose reassures me that La Graciosa won’t be building any high rise hotels anytime soon: “The islanders recognise that the beauty of their island, its unique nature, is their number one asset. And they cherish that. You can see that in the way they are with visitors, in the way they gently help you with where you should and should not walk and cycle.”
Jose steers me to Restaurante El Veril. Local seafood – La Graciosa still has a small fleet of fishing boats – tempts. The smell alone drives me to grilled lapas (delicious garlicky limpets plucked straight from the island’s rocks), followed by boat-fresh lobster rice.
After two days, I feel like I’ve been here a week. Time doesn’t so much slow down in this land of big beaches and endless skies as start to drift teasingly backwards. On the ferry back I gaze up towards the Mirador del Rio, the famous Lanzarote viewpoint that offers a grandstand view of La Graciosa. A tangle of tour buses queue to snatch a glimpse of an isle whose fishermen used to sail across in tiny boats to scale the sheer, 400m-high cliffs to trade right on this spot. Back then, La Graciosa felt distant, a world away from the rest of the Canary Isles. Today - blissfully - it still does.
Travel essentials
You can catch the ferry to La Graciosa from Lanzarote.
Getting there
Trying to fly less?
Take a Eurostar from London to Paris and change for a train to Barcelona. The following day you can catch a train to Cadiz with a change in Seville. It’s then possible to get a ferry to Lanzarote from the port of Cadiz.
Fine with flying?
EasyJet flies from various UK airports to Lanzarote.
Staying there
If you want to stay a few nights, there are a gaggle of pensions and apartments in Caleto del Sebo, and the island also has a designated camping area, too.
More information
Full tourist information can be found at visitlagraciosa.com.
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