What to Eat in Fuerteventura

Fuerteventura's food comes down to two things: goats and the sea. The island is flat, dry and windswept, with no forest, no rivers and rainfall measured in a handful of days a year, so almost nothing grows here without help. What thrives instead is a hardy local goat, the majorera, which turns thin salty scrub into milk of unusual quality — and an Atlantic coastline long enough to feed the island several times over.

That gives you a short menu, cooked plainly and done very well: the best goat's cheese in Spain, grilled fish straight off small boats, kid and goat stewed slowly with garlic and paprika, gofio in everything, and papas arrugadas on the side of all of it. It is not an elaborate cuisine. It is a precise one.

There is also more history on the plate here than on any other island, because Fuerteventura was the archipelago's grain store for centuries, and its windmills, its salt pans and its cheese are all survivors of that economy.

Majorero: Spain's first protected goat's cheese

Queso Majorero is the reason to come hungry. Made from the raw or pasteurised milk of the majorera goat, it was the first Spanish goat's cheese to be granted protected designation of origin, and it wins international medals with a regularity that embarrasses larger producers. Young, it is white, moist and mild with a clean lactic tang. Aged, it firms up, deepens and develops a nutty, peppery, faintly salty edge that comes straight from what the goats eat.

The rind tells you what you are getting. Producers rub it with one of three things: pimentón (paprika), which gives the orange-red crust most people picture; gofio, toasted milled grain, for a tan rind and a toasted flavour; or olive oil, for the plainest and often the most expensive. The cheese also carries a pattern pressed into its sides by the mould, traditionally woven palm leaf, which is why a wheel looks braided.

Eat it three ways. As a wedge with bread. Griddled — queso asado, a thick slice seared until it softens, served with green mojo or palm honey, and one of the great Canarian starters. Or grated over a stew. The archipelago's other cheeses are worth comparing, but this is the one the rest are measured against.

The goats, and the number

It is often said that goats outnumber people on Fuerteventura. That was comfortably true for most of the island's history, and today it is a close-run thing: the resident population has grown quickly with tourism and now sits well over a hundred thousand, while the goat herd is also counted in six figures. Treat the claim as a good story about the island's character rather than a current statistic.

What is not in doubt is the breed. The majorera is a hardy, drought-tolerant goat that has been on the island since before the Spanish conquest, kept by the indigenous Majos who gave both the goat and the islanders their name. Some herds are still grazed loose on open ground and rounded up periodically, an old practice that survives in the apañadas, the communal goat round-ups held in some villages. The goats' diet of salt-tolerant scrub is precisely what puts the mineral edge into the cheese.

Goat on the plate

Goat meat is everyday food here. Carne de cabra is adult goat, stewed for hours with wine, garlic, bay, thyme and paprika until it shreds; it is strong, dark and excellent. Baifo is kid goat, pale and tender, treated more gently and usually roasted or fried with garlic — the more expensive and the more delicate of the two. Village restaurants inland do both better than the coastal resorts.

The obvious place to eat it is Betancuria, the island's old capital in the hills, where several restaurants specialise in it and the drive over is one of the best on Fuerteventura. Pájara and the inland villages of La Oliva and Antigua are the others. Rabbit in salmorejo appears on the same menus; the marinated rabbit dish is cooked here much as it is on the other islands.

Fish, and where the boats land

Fuerteventura's fish is as good as anywhere in the Canaries and generally cheaper, because the fishing villages are still fishing villages. El Cotillo in the north-west, with its old harbour and its string of restaurants above the rocks, is the best-known; Ajuy on the west coast sits below black cliffs and does simple grilled fish at plastic tables; Gran Tarajal and Morro Jable in the south both have working fleets.

Order whatever the waiter says came in. Vieja, cherne, sama and bocinegro are the names to recognise, and fish is sold by weight, so ask what your choice will come to before it goes on the grill. Lapas — limpets prised off the rocks and grilled with green mojo — are the local starter, salty and chewy and worth ordering once. How fish works on a Canarian menu covers the rest.

Gofio, the mills, and a detail worth knowing

Fuerteventura was the granary of the Canaries, growing wheat, barley and maize for islands that could not feed themselves, and the grain was milled into gofio — toasted flour, the oldest staple in the archipelago, eaten as a paste, stirred into milk, scalded into broth or kneaded into a ball beside a plate of fish.

The mills are still standing all over the island, and here is the detail visitors miss. There are two distinct kinds. A molino is the older stone tower mill, tall, with the machinery upstairs, worked by men. A molina is a later nineteenth-century design — a low building with the grinding stones at ground level and the sail assembly mounted above — and it was developed specifically so that a woman could operate it alone while the men were away at sea or in the fields. Both are protected; the windmills of Fuerteventura and the restored farmstead at La Alcogida show how the whole system worked.

Salt, and the things that come with it

The Salinas del Carmen on the east coast are working salt pans with a small salt museum attached, and they explain the other half of the old island economy: salt for curing the fish that the fleet brought back from the African banks, a few dozen miles east. That fish became sancocho, still the Sunday and Easter dish across the Canaries.

Local sea salt, a jar of mojo and a vacuum-packed wedge of Majorero make the most sensible souvenir haul on the island — all three keep, all three travel, and what you can bring back sets out the rules. Aloe vera products are the other thing sold everywhere here, with variable honesty about what is actually in them.

Almogrote, and the borrowed dishes

You will see almogrote on menus: a thick, russet paste of hard aged cheese, garlic, paprika and oil, spread on bread and served as a free nibble or a starter. It is a La Gomera speciality rather than a Fuerteventuran one, but it travels around the archipelago and it is very good made with an aged Majorero. The island specialities page covers where it came from.

The same goes for the big pot dishes — puchero, potaje de berros, ropa vieja — which are cooked here as they are everywhere in the Canaries. The soups and potajes are the cheapest good lunch on the island and the thing to order from a menú del día in an inland village.

Eating well on a flat island

Most visitors stay at the two ends — Corralejo in the north and the Jandía strip in the south — and both have long promenades of restaurants aimed at a British, Irish and German market. The good ones are there, but the island's own cooking is inland and in the fishing villages, and Fuerteventura is long, so a hire car matters more here than on Lanzarote or Gran Canaria. The bus network connects the towns reasonably and the villages barely.

A good day: the drive over the hills to Betancuria for goat at lunchtime, down to Ajuy for the cliffs in the afternoon, back to the coast for cheese and a glass of something at sunset. The island is not going to overwhelm you with choice, which is rather the point — Fuerteventura is at its best when it is doing four things properly.

Before you fly home

Buy a whole small wheel of Majorero, aged and rubbed with paprika, and eat it for a fortnight after you get back. Nothing else you carry out of the Canary Islands will remind you of a place so precisely: a dry island, salt-scrub grazing, a goat breed that has been here longer than Spain, and a cheese that beats far richer countries at their own competitions.

If you are hopping on, Lanzarote's kitchen is the closest relative — the same volcanic thrift, more wine, fewer goats — and the wider Canarian repertoire will fill in everything this flat, windy, excellent island does not grow.