Antigua

The first thing you notice is the hush. Not silence exactly – a tractor idles somewhere, a cockerel rehearses – but the sort of softened sound that makes British ears strain for traffic that never comes. Antigua’s inland plaza is 14 km from the airport, yet the only thing passing overhead is a pair of ravens riding the Atlantic breeze.

This is the island’s agricultural heart, scattered across a shallow volcanic bowl at 250 m above sea level. Dry-stone walls divide fields of alfalfa and sorghum; white single-storey houses sit low, as if ducking the wind. The village proper – church, bakery, chemist, three bars – clusters round a single T-junction. You can walk from one end to the other in eight minutes, assuming you pause to read the hand-painted tile outside Bar La Villa: “Café 1,20 €, toasted sandwich 2,50 €, Wi-Fi if the wind allows.”

Wind, wheat and wheels

Antigua takes its name from the fifteenth-century hermitage that still presides over the square. The building is austere even by Canarian standards: lava-block walls, a roof of Roman tile, two bells that clang the hour five minutes early. Inside, the air smells of candle wax and recently oiled pine; the retablo is carved from driftwood salvaged after a 1912 shipwreck. Mass is sung once daily, attendance rarely tops twenty, yet the parish manages to keep the lights on by renting out its former schoolhouse to a women’s cooperative that embroiders tablecloths sold in John Lewis’s “authentic craft” range. British buyers seldom realise the connection.

Surrounding the church are six restored windmills, their sails stripped long ago. One, Molino de Antigua, opens as an eco-museum (entry €3, closed Mon–Tue Oct–Mar). Climb the stone stairs and you’ll find the original French millstones, still marked “Moulins Bourgeois, Paris 1886”. On Sunday mornings the ground floor becomes a craft market: palm-leaf baskets, goat-cheese truckles, jars of mojo stamped with ingredient lists in Comic Sans. Stallholders accept euros only; the nearest ATM is inside the adjacent HiperDino, itself shut between 2 pm and 5 pm. Timing matters here.

The museum’s curator, a retired teacher called María, keeps a visitor’s book thick with Sussex postcodes. She notes that Brits ask two questions more than any other nationality: “Does the wind ever stop?” and “Where can we buy proper milk?” The answers are “rarely” and “next to the UHT in HiperDino”.

Cheese, kids and circular walks

Goat farming underpins the local economy. There are 3,500 animals for every human resident, and the thud of hooves on metal ramps starts at dawn. The Museo del Queso Majorero, five minutes’ drive towards the FV-20, explains how the island earned its DOP status in 1996. Exhibits are labelled in Spanish only, but the staff hand out laminated English sheets that translate curiously: “The rennet is extracted from the stomach of the recently deceased kid, so please respect the process.” Tastings follow; the semi-curado, rubbed in gofio toasted maize meal, goes down well with Brits who profess to hate goat cheese. Vacuum-packed wedges travel safely in hand luggage; customs at Gatwick waved through 2,400 last year.

A signed 6 km circular path, the Ruta de los Molinos, starts behind the museum and threads past two working dairies. Way-marking is sporadic – look for yellow dashes on dry walls – and the mid-section crosses a barranco of ankle-twisting lava. Good trainers are sufficient; boots are overkill unless you visit after rain, when the path turns to porridge. Morning is best: by noon the Trade Wind accelerates and fine grit finds its way into contact lenses.

When the land tilts to the sea

Antigua municipality owns 18 km of coast, but the old village stands 10 km inland. Reaching the shore means driving through fields that finish abruptly at biscuit-coloured cliffs. The nearest beach, Playa de la Garita, lies below the village of the same name: a 500 m sweep of pale sand backed by a single fish restaurant and a car park that fills with German campervans by 10 am. Currents are gentle, the shore break rarely above knee height, yet the Atlantic stays cool even in August; British teenagers last about twenty minutes before requesting hot chocolate. Snorkellers head to the western end where a lava tongue creates a natural rock pool busy with parrotfish and the occasional seahorse.

Serious wind- and kitesurfers push further south to Playa de los Matos, a breezy bay that launches directly onto a reef. Lessons operate November–April when the wind stabilises at 18–22 knots; summer thermals are gusty and best left to locals. Equipment rental is cheaper here than in flag-waving Caleta de Fuste, ten minutes east, but there is no rescue service – something the liver-coloured noticeboard translates bluntly as: “If you drift to Morocco, call 112.”

Eating after eleven

Evenings in the plaza smell of wood smoke and grilled kid. Restaurant choice is limited to four family-run places; menus overlap by 80 per cent and all close by 22:30. The unwritten rule is that tourists may linger until 23:00 if they’ve ordered coffee, but the lights still go off punctually. Brits used to Spanish-city late nights are startled to find themselves escorted politely to the door while the staff stack chairs.

El Patio, on Calle La Orilla, serves the best value cabrito al estilo majorero – shoulder of kid slow-roasted in garlic and coriander, €14 half portion, enough for two if you add papas arrugadas (€3). House red is a young Listán Negro from Lanzarote; it arrives slightly chilled, an idea that would horrify a Rioja producer yet works in 25 °C heat. Vegetarians get ropa vieja of chickpeas and squash, though every dish arrives sprinkled with diced ham unless you plead otherwise.

For self-caterers the HiperDino stocks mature Cheddar at €9 for 200 g, a price that convinces many expats to embrace the local queso instead. The in-store bakery turns out crusty pan moreno at €1.20 a loaf; it keeps for three days if you’re caravanning and don’t mind a bit of jaw exercise.

Where to lay your head

There is no five-star option. Most visitors rent one of the converted farmhouses that sit in silent lanes south of the church. Two-bedroom casas rurales start at €75 a night year-round; owners leave a pint of milk and a packet of locally grown chamomile tea on the kitchen table, a gesture that feels almost painfully thoughtful. Pools are rare – the water table is too low – but most patios catch enough sun between 11 am and 4 pm to satisfy the average SAD-afflicted Brit. Bring pound-coin adaptors; Spanish sockets are universal Euro but the fuse boxes trip at 10 amps the moment you plug in a UK hairdryer.

If you must have a reception desk, the Rural Era de la Corte is the closest thing to a hotel: 15 rooms set round a sandstone courtyard where swallows nest in the eaves. Doubles €95 B&B, dinner €18 for three courses, wine included. Wi-Fi reaches the rooms but slows to a crawl whenever the wind turbines on the northern ridge spin above 35 kph – roughly every afternoon.

The price of peace

Antigua’s great virtue is its lack of show. There are no karaoke bars, no infinity pools, no reps hawking booze cruises. That is also its limitation. Stay longer than three days and you may find yourself driving repeatedly to Caleta for a newspaper, a cash machine that doesn’t charge €2, or simply a streetlight. The village wakes late, closes early and regards Sundays as sacred not in a church sense but in a “don’t expect anything to be open” sense. Rainfall is scant – 120 mm a year – yet when it arrives the lanes turn to sticky clay and hire cars slide gracelessly into ditches. Recovery takes 24 hours; the single local grúa driver likes his siesta.

Still, for travellers who measure holiday success in litres of unpolluted air and the number of goats photographed, Antigua delivers. Come in late March when the sorghum fields glow emerald against black lava, or in late October when the cheese festival fills the square with free samples and a brass band that has clearly practised. Fly into Fuerteventura, collect a rental car, and within twenty minutes you can be sitting on the church steps watching a game of petanque played entirely in silence. The only soundtrack is the clack of boules and, somewhere above, the wind doing what it has done for four hundred years – turning mill sails that are no longer there.