Fuerteonline - The Fuerteventura Portal

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Shrouded in mystery, Cofete is in the most isolated corner of Fuerteventura. Even today, the village can only be reached by an exhausting track or along the local people’s old paths over the pass that leads upwards from the Gran Valle to the ridge.

At the highest point, between the peaks of Pico de la Zarza and Fraile, a breathtaking view of north and south opens up. The legendary Villa Winter stands on a fenced piece of land with the same geographical shape as Fuerteventura. Its position on the site is the same as its actual location on the island. Originally designed as a manor house, the complex was intended to ensure land cultivation in the region, according to the owners at the time. The plan was to organize farm work and sales on practical lines, and to acquire modern technology. The only access road to Cofete (that can also be used by cars) originated at that time. The little town of Cofete itself is nondescript, and many of the houses are only lived in at the weekend, as their owners live and work in Morro Jable. In course of time, Cofete has also reached a certain level of affluence - next to the old cottages made out of jetsam and other simple materials, new fincas made of breeze blocks are springing up, with television aerials on their roofs. By day, the Bar Cofete is a stop off for day trippers exhausted from the rough, dusty road; in the evening, the few real locals are undisturbed.
If you turn from the mysteries of history to look at nature, you will see Fuerteventura here in all its lonely, rugged wildness, which makes such a contrast to the gentle beaches of the south coast on the opposite side.
Long walks on the kilometres long beach of Barlovento can be a really experience of nature, with the high and dangerous surf of the breakers smashing on the shore and driving forward over the sand, where there are still sandpipers - tiny birds looking for food in the receding waves, where jetsam is still washed ashore by the tide, as it was a hundred years ago. In the background is the massif of Jandía with the highest mountain on the island, and along the way grow shrubs of euphorbia handiensis, a species endemic to the Canaries, that looks like a cactus and that exists in this form only in Jandía.