Pajara is a small, green, entirely inland village in the hills of central Fuerteventura whose seventeenth-century church carries a carved stone doorway that looks as though it was shipped in from Mexico — and nobody has ever satisfactorily explained why. It takes fifteen minutes to see and it is the single most puzzling object on the island.
The village itself is a surprise in its own right. Fuerteventura is famously bare, and most visitors only ever see the dunes, the resorts and the long brown drives between them. Pajara sits in a valley where a watercourse runs after rain, and it has trees — real, broad, shade-giving trees — around a small plaza with benches, a fountain and old stone houses. After an hour crossing the dry interior it feels like an oasis, which is more or less what it is.
It is also, and this is the administrative joke of Fuerteventura, the seat of one of the largest and richest municipalities in the Canary Islands. The town hall in this quiet square governs Costa Calma, Morro Jable, La Pared and the whole Jandia peninsula — the island's entire southern tourist economy — from a village of a few hundred people with a laurel tree in the middle of it.
The doorway
The church of Nuestra Senora de Regla sits on the plaza, low and white with a dark stone bell gable. The main facade carries a portal of pale carved stone, and it is worth walking up to it slowly, because the detail rewards it.
Around the arch, in flat relief, are rows of geometric motifs and figures: rosettes, suns, snakes or serpents facing one another, lions or big cats, birds, and interlocking patterns. The composition is symmetrical, the carving is shallow and stylised, and the whole effect is nothing like the baroque Spanish church doorways found elsewhere in the islands. It has been described for well over a century as looking Aztec, and the resemblance to Mesoamerican relief carving is genuinely striking.
Four explanations, none proven
This is where the honest answer has to be that nobody knows. The competing theories are:
- American influence. That craftsmen who had worked in the Spanish colonies in Mexico or Peru returned to the islands and brought the visual language home with them. Canarians emigrated to the Americas in enormous numbers and many came back — the indianos shaped island architecture in other documented ways.
- Islamic and mudejar influence. That the geometry and the interlace are Iberian mudejar work — the Moorish-derived decorative tradition that runs right through Spanish craft — and that the "Aztec" reading is a Victorian misunderstanding.
- Portuguese Manueline influence. Portuguese settlers and masons were active on Fuerteventura, and the exuberant, rope-and-nature ornament of the Manueline style has been proposed as a source.
- A local mason simply inventing. The least glamorous and arguably the most likely: a Fuerteventura stonecutter working from whatever he had seen, in a place a very long way from professional supervision.
The church itself dates broadly to the second half of the seventeenth century, with the portal generally placed in that period, and it has two naves side by side rather than the usual one — the second added as the parish grew. Inside there are painted retables and a mudejar-style wooden ceiling, the geometric coffered woodwork that Canarian churches inherited from Andalusia and that our page on traditional Canarian architecture explains.
This is a small parish church, not a museum. Opening is irregular and often tied to mass times or to a volunteer being available; the doorway, which is the point, is outside and visible at any hour. Do not plan a day around getting inside.
The village
Beyond the church there is a plaza with substantial shade trees, a handful of bars and small restaurants, a couple of shops, the town hall and a scatter of restored stone houses with wooden balconies. Old irrigation channels and a dry watercourse run through, and there are palms and bougainvillea. The whole thing takes twenty minutes to walk and an hour to sit in properly.
The correct use of Pajara is lunch. Village restaurants here serve the island's own cooking — kid goat, Majorero goat's cheese at three different ages, soups, gofio — at inland prices rather than Jandia ones. Our guide to what to eat on Fuerteventura covers the island's cheese, which is protected by its own denomination of origin and is among the best in Spain; the wider Canarian cheese page explains the paprika and gofio rinds you will see on the counter.
The municipality that owns the south
Here is the fact that reframes the whole village. The municipality of Pajara covers a large part of the southern half of Fuerteventura, running from this inland valley all the way down the Jandia peninsula to the island's southern tip. Within its boundaries lie Morro Jable, Costa Calma, the lagoon at Sotavento, Playa del Matorral, the wild sweep of Cofete and the surf coast at La Pared.
That means the planning decisions, the beach management and the tourist tax arrangements for some of the most valuable holiday real estate in the Atlantic are debated in a building on this square. Historically the relationship has not always been comfortable — the south generates the money and the inland village holds the council — and there have been periodic proposals to split the municipality. It is a small insight into how these islands actually work, and the sort of thing you would never guess from a sunbed at Costa Calma.
Ajuy, twenty minutes west
The obvious pairing, and the reason most people are on this road in the first place, is Ajuy — a black-sand fishing hamlet on the west coast reached by a winding descent from Pajara. There are half a dozen fish restaurants on the seafront and a path north along the cliff to a set of enormous sea caves, cut into rock that is among the oldest exposed on any of the islands: this is uplifted ocean floor, far older than the volcanoes above it.
The walk takes twenty minutes each way on a stepped path, and the caves were used historically for loading lime from the kilns you pass on the way. The swell on this coast is serious and the beach is not a safe swimming beach — go for the geology, the caves and the fish.
Vega de Rio Palmas and the island's patron
North of Pajara, on the road towards Betancuria, the valley of Vega de Rio Palmas holds the small hermitage of Nuestra Senora de la Pena — the shrine of the patron saint of Fuerteventura. The image is tiny, a few centimetres of alabaster, and the story attaches it to the very earliest years of the Norman conquest of the island in the first years of the fifteenth century.
On the third Saturday of September the island walks here in a romeria that fills the valley — the biggest day in the Fuerteventura calendar, with pilgrims arriving on foot from every corner of the island. Outside that weekend it is a very quiet spot with palms and a dry riverbed, and it makes a natural stop between Pajara and Betancuria.
The drive
Getting to Pajara is half the pleasure. The road climbs through the eroded volcanic hills of the Betancuria massif — the oldest part of Fuerteventura, worn into rounded brown ridges over twenty million years — with viewpoints along the way. The Mirador de Sicasumbre, south of the village on the road towards La Pared, is a small astronomical viewpoint with sculpted stone platforms and a huge dark sky at night.
You will need a car; the island's bus network connects the towns rather than the villages and is thin in the interior, as our page on buses on Fuerteventura sets out. Roads are good and empty, distances feel longer than they are, and there is almost no fuel between settlements. Allow about an hour from Costa Calma and rather longer from Corralejo.
Before you go
Pajara is a stop, not a destination — half an hour for the church, an hour for lunch under the trees, and back on the road. But it belongs on any day that also takes in Betancuria, Ajuy and the Vega, and that day is the best inland outing on Fuerteventura by a distance.
Go for the doorway. Stand in front of it, work through the theories, and enjoy the fact that a building in a village of a few hundred people in the middle of the Atlantic has been arguing with art historians for a hundred and fifty years without conceding anything. For the rest of the island's inland pleasures — the windmills, the sacred Montana Tindaya and the walking — see our list of things to do on Fuerteventura.