Playa Honda

Playa Honda is where Lanzarote's own residents go to the beach: a long, genuinely good strip of pale sand with a promenade behind it, a town of ordinary flats and local shops, and prices roughly half what you pay ten minutes away in the resorts. It is not a holiday resort and it has never pretended to be. It is a dormitory town between Arrecife and the airport that happens to have one of the best beaches on the island in front of it.

The trade-off is obvious from the moment you arrive, and there is no point being coy about it: the airport is right there. The runway begins a few hundred metres from the southern end of the beach, and aircraft taking off and landing pass close and low. Whether that ruins the place or is simply background depends entirely on the person, and a good many people decide it is background.

Administratively this is San Bartolomé, not Arrecife, though the two have grown towards each other along the coast. The town has expanded fast over the last few decades and now has a substantial resident population, which is why it feels like somewhere people live rather than somewhere people visit — supermarkets rather than souvenir shops, a proper pharmacy, schools, and bars where the menu is in Spanish and priced for a working lunch.

The beach

Playa Honda's beach runs for a couple of kilometres along the front, broad at low water, with pale golden sand rather than the dark grit found in much of the island's north. It shelves gently, the water is usually calm because the coast faces south-east and is out of the main swell, and there are showers, ramps and seasonal lifeguard cover along the developed stretch.

It is also almost never crowded by resort standards, because the people using it are locals and they spread out. Weekend afternoons bring families with cool boxes and football; weekday mornings you will share a kilometre of sand with a dozen walkers. Sections of this coast have carried Blue Flag status in past seasons — our page on what a Blue Flag actually certifies explains why that is worth rather less than most visitors assume, and what it does tell you.

The cable that gave the beach its name

The northern end of the strand is called Playa del Cable, and the name is literal. This is where a submarine telegraph cable came ashore. From the late nineteenth century British companies laid a network of undersea cables down the Atlantic to connect Europe with West Africa and South America, and the Canary Islands were an essential relay point on that chain — the islands' position made them the switchboard of the South Atlantic long before they were a holiday destination.

The cable stations brought British engineers, British families and British money to Las Palmas and Lanzarote, and they are one of the reasons an odd amount of Victorian British influence lingers in the islands — a connection traced properly in our piece on the British and the Canary Islands. There is little to see today beyond the name on the map and a stretch of shoreline, but it is worth knowing that the beach you are lying on was once a node in the Victorian internet.

The promenade

A paved seafront promenade runs the length of the town, flat, wide and lit, and it is the centre of local life in the evening. People walk it, run it, push prams along it and sit on the benches; there is a scatter of bars, ice cream places and a few restaurants directly on it.

The promenade continues north towards Arrecife, and walking or cycling into the capital along the coast is one of the easy pleasures of staying here — an hour or so at a stroll, less on a bike, finishing at the lagoon of Charco de San Ginés with its white fishermen's houses and its tapas bars. It is flat the whole way.

Let us talk about the aeroplanes

César Manrique-Lanzarote airport sits immediately south of the town, and its single runway runs roughly parallel to the coast. Depending on the wind direction of the day, aircraft either climb out over the sea past the beach or come in low on approach over the same area. They are close enough that you can read the airline.

Three things make it more tolerable than it sounds. Lanzarote's traffic is heavily concentrated into the charter arrival and departure waves rather than being continuous, so there are long quiet stretches in the middle of the day. There is very little night traffic. And the noise is a passing event of thirty seconds rather than a constant hum. Plenty of residents genuinely stop noticing, and some visitors — particularly children and anyone with the slightest interest in aviation — treat the beach as a free viewing gallery.

Why people choose it

The case for Playa Honda is a good one if you know what you want.

• Price. Apartment rents, restaurant bills, supermarket shopping and a coffee all cost what they cost for residents, not what they cost in Puerto del Carmen. Over a fortnight the difference is significant — our page on what things actually cost in the Canaries gives the typical ranges.
• The transfer. It is five to ten minutes from the terminal. You can be on the beach an hour after landing.
• Position. It is roughly in the middle of the island's inhabited coast, which makes it a sensible base for driving anywhere — Timanfaya, the north, the wine country and Playa Blanca are all within about forty minutes.
• Real life. You will hear Spanish, queue behind people doing their weekly shop, and eat where the airport staff eat.

It is particularly popular with repeat visitors who have done Lanzarote several times, know the island, want a car and a flat and a beach, and have no interest in a hotel entertainment programme. For the alternatives, our guide to where to stay on Lanzarote compares the resorts properly.

Why people do not

Equally honestly: there is no resort infrastructure. No large hotel complexes, no evening entertainment, no excursion desk, few English menus and limited English spoken in the everyday shops. There are no sights in the town itself. If you want a holiday delivered to you rather than one you assemble, this is the wrong base and Puerto del Carmen or Costa Teguise is the right one.

Most accommodation is privately let apartments rather than package accommodation, which means booking direct and reading the listing carefully — our notes on renting an apartment in the islands cover the practicalities, including the tourist licence question.

Wind, and what to do with it

This coast catches the trade wind, which blows across the island for most of the year and is stronger in summer than in winter. On the beach it means the sand moves and a windbreak is a sensible purchase; in the water it means chop rather than swell. Our page on how windy the Canaries really are sets out the seasonal pattern.

The compensation is that the same wind makes this a workable spot for windsurfing and kitesurfing, and you will see sails out most afternoons. Lanzarote's serious board coast is Famara on the north-west side, but for a casual session with the gear hired locally, this beach does the job.

Getting around

Buses connect Playa Honda with Arrecife and along the coast frequently, and Arrecife is the hub for the rest of the island — the Lanzarote bus network explains the routes and where the gaps are. Realistically you want a car, and picking one up at the airport five minutes away is about as painless as car hire gets; see Lanzarote airport transfers for the options if you are not driving.

The bottom line

Playa Honda is a local town with an excellent beach and an airport at the end of it. If you want a cheap, flat, well-connected base on Lanzarote with real shops and a two-kilometre strip of sand you will rarely have to share, it is an extremely good deal and it is badly underrated.

If you want a resort, it is not one. Spend your days out — the Manrique sites in the north, the volcanoes inland, the island's better-known beaches down south — and come back in the evening to a promenade where nobody is trying to sell you anything. That is the deal, and for a certain kind of traveller it is the right one.