CANARY ISLANDS

Summary

---

This desert trail on Fuerteventura Island, leads the hiker into a marvelous canyon full of delightful formations. Enjoy this area as the remainder of the trail was rather uninspiring.

Trail Stats

---

Trail Details

---

To reach the trailhead for Barranco de Los Encantados, head south from the small town of El Cotillo on a dusty dirt road. There are a few turn off’s that are not necessarily marked, plan accordingly and know your route. For that matter, the entire trail is relatively unmarked and somewhat difficult to follow. Make sure you have the trail mapped out if you’re unfamiliar with the area. We preemptively downloaded the trail map on our Gaia app so we could reference where we were when we inevitably lost the trail on this hike. Came in rather handy.

After a while you’ll drive into a wash. The trail is off to the left and there’s a parking area of sorts to leave the car in. Parking is up a small hill and is relatively flat. The trail begins just beyond the parking area.

Starting out, the trail appears more road like than an actual trail. We had a bike tour pass us fairly early on. Seems like a relatively popular area. The trail took us up a rather wide wash area. There wasn’t all that much to see initially. Desert and a one walled wash. Upon closer inspection, the walls of the wash were loaded with small pebbles and even teeming with small shells. There were occasional miniature natural arches, about the size of a large fist, along the wall.

After walking a ways we diverted off trail into a small slot like canyon. The walls were pocked by erosion and provided some rather nice visual interest. On a less appealing note, there were an unbelievable quantity of caterpillars on the move in here. Gross. Thousands of creepy crawlers doing their thing. Wouldn’t have been so bad but they kept falling from the rocks above. Having caterpillars bounce off my head and shoulders wasn’t quite what I had in mind for the day.

This mini canyon is very short in length. Reaching the top there was a vague indication of a trail continuing further. We decided to turn around, largely due to me not believing this was the actual turn off point for the hike. In retrospect, we should have followed that trail.

Instead we went back down to the main wash. And wandered further up it, looking for a turn off. We found one and did this “lollipop” section of the hike in a clockwise fashion. It would be better to do it counter clockwise. I think the views would be more spectacular that way. The ends of the “lollipop” do not match up. Meaning they do not come out at the exact same spot as where we entered, there’s a small split. Had we continued on the previous mini slot canyon trail it would have dumped us into the counter clockwise portion of the loop. If we’d chosen not to do that we could have still gone counter clockwise further up trail. But, to me, this way didn’t look as if it lead to anything. Thus we went clockwise. Not my best decision. Granted, there are no signs or obvious markers. It’s very much a “go as you will” kind of loop. Just don’t wander off into a desert filled oblivion. It’s hot out there and there’s not much around if you truly get lost.

Our chosen path meandered along a valley for a bit. It’s the less interesting portion of the loop if I’m being honest. A few interesting veins through rocks and a few places where we scrambled amongst the rocks. The trail is not marked. We referenced our app to maintain the general direction of the trail. There are what appeared to be many various trails you could take.

After a short time we reached a plateau. There are some pretty little flowers dotting the landscape here. More importantly, we finally reached the top of the main canyon. As there’s no signage we guessed we’d head straight down the center of the canyon. I believe this is the route most people choose, though there was a visible trail along the rim as well.

Within a few paces into the canyon, the trail transformed from what we’d considered a rather boring and disappointing hike into one of those magical and mysterious places that completely redeemed the entire path. Bizarre looking “stacks” dotted the hillsides, putting the power of erosion and beauty of nature on full display. Small offshoots and washes lead to natural arches and miniature slot canyons to explore. It’s breathtaking.

The trail eventually leaves this blissful canyon and you’ll walk back out to the main road-like trail you came in on. Head on down to return to the trailhead.

---