Puerto Calero

Puerto Calero is Lanzarote's smart marina: a horseshoe of white low-rise buildings around a basin of expensive boats, with restaurants along the quay, dive boats and catamarans going out all day, and no beach at all. It is not a resort in the usual sense and it is not a village. It is a purpose-built harbour that grew a small settlement around it, and it is one of the most pleasant hours you can spend on the island's south coast.

It lies in the municipality of Yaiza, a few kilometres west of Puerto del Carmen and roughly twenty minutes from the airport. Before the 1980s there was essentially nothing here: a stretch of low volcanic coast with a sheltered aspect and no settlement. The harbour was created by a Lanzarote businessman, José Calero, whose family name it carries — which is why you will not find any older Spanish meaning behind the word. The marina is named after the man who built it.

What that history produced is unusual for a marina anywhere: because the whole thing was designed at once, and designed under the architectural rules that César Manrique had by then persuaded the island to adopt, it is uniformly low, white and calm rather than a jumble of competing developments. Nothing blocks the view of anything else.

The colour code you will start to notice

Here is the detail worth carrying around the whole island. Lanzarote follows a convention for how buildings are painted — white walls, and woodwork in one of a small number of permitted colours according to where the building stands. On the coast, doors, shutters and window frames are traditionally painted blue; inland, in the agricultural villages, they are green. Brown and natural wood appear in the wine country and on older rural buildings.

Once somebody points this out you cannot unsee it, and it explains why an island of otherwise plain, boxy, flat-roofed houses reads as so deliberately composed. Puerto Calero is blue — it is a harbour — and the consistency is part of why it feels expensive. Drive up through La Geria or out to Haría afterwards and watch the paintwork change colour as you leave the sea behind.

The marina and the boats

The basin itself holds several hundred berths, including deep-water berths that take genuinely large yachts, and it functions as a full service harbour — fuel, a boatyard, chandlery, customs clearance for arriving Atlantic crossings. In late autumn the pontoons fill with cruising boats staging for the trade-wind crossing to the Caribbean, which is the most interesting time to walk round and read the home ports on the transoms: Plymouth, Hamburg, Gothenburg, Lymington.

Walking the pontoons is free and nobody minds, within reason. If you are chartering rather than gawping, our page on sailing and yacht charter in the Canaries covers bareboat and skippered options and the paperwork involved.

Boat trips: what actually goes out from here

Puerto Calero is one of the two main excursion harbours on Lanzarote, and the range is wide. Catamaran day trips run west along the coast to the Papagayo beaches with lunch and swimming stops, which is the single most popular outing and much the best way to see that coastline. Dive boats go out morning and afternoon; the diving off this coast is volcanic wall-and-arch terrain, and it is the nearest quality diving to the resorts.

The harbour has also long been the base for tourist submarine trips — an actual submersible that takes passengers down to look at the seabed through portholes, which is a novelty not available on most of the islands and a good wet-weather-proof option with children. Deep-sea fishing charters and dolphin-spotting trips go from here too. Prices and schedules change every season, so book through the operators' own desks on the quay rather than relying on any figure you read online.

Eating on the quay

The restaurants wrap around the marina at water level, with terraces looking straight at the boats, and they are the main reason islanders and long-stay visitors drive over. The range runs from straightforward Canarian grilled fish to Italian, Indian and a couple of more ambitious kitchens, and prices sit above Puerto del Carmen and well above an inland village — you are paying for the view and you know it.

It is at its best in the evening, when the water goes still and the lights come on across the basin. Order the local white from La Geria rather than a mainland Spanish wine; it is grown twenty minutes up the road and it is exactly what the fish here was made for. Our page on Lanzarote's own food explains the island's sweet onions, its goat's cheese and the rest of it.

Staying here: the honest case

There is accommodation at Puerto Calero — a hotel and a spread of villas and apartments on the slope behind — and it is the quietest smart option on this coast. Consider it if you want calm, good food on the doorstep and a base for boats, and if you have a hire car.

Think hard about it if you want a beach, because there is not one here. The nearest proper sand is at Puerto del Carmen, ten minutes east, and the best beaches on this side of the island are the Papagayo coves down at the southern tip, half an hour away by road. Playa Quemada, a tiny shingle bay with a couple of fish restaurants, is the closest swimming spot and is reached by a coast walk or a short drive. Our overview of where to stay on Lanzarote sets the options against each other.

The coast walk to Puerto del Carmen

One of the better free things to do on this part of the island is the coastal path between Puerto Calero and Puerto del Carmen. It is flat, well surfaced for most of its length, and runs along a low cliff with the Atlantic on one side and almost nothing on the other — around forty-five minutes to an hour each way at an easy pace.

Go early, before the sun is high, and take water; there is no shade. It is the sort of walk that works well in one direction with a bus or taxi back, and it connects the marina to somewhere with a proper beach and a full range of shops.

Getting to Fuerteventura from next door

Puerto Calero is not a ferry port for passengers heading between islands. The crossing to Fuerteventura goes from Playa Blanca at the southern tip of Lanzarote, about twenty-five minutes' drive away, to Corralejo on the Fuerteventura side. It is a short hop across a strait of about eleven kilometres, with several operators, frequent sailings through the day, and the option of taking a car.

It makes an entirely feasible day out — Corralejo's dunes and beaches in the morning, back in the evening — and it is one of the best-value excursions on Lanzarote because you can do it under your own steam. Our page on the inter-island ferries covers the routes and booking; for planning the door-to-door logistics with an onward transfer, viamo.net has the ground transport side.

What to combine it with

Puerto Calero sits conveniently for the island's two great sights. Timanfaya and its fire mountains are half an hour inland; the Manrique sites are spread across the island's north and easily strung into a day. Divers should know that the Museo Atlántico, Europe's first underwater sculpture museum, lies off Playa Blanca and is dived from both harbours.

Buses serve the marina from Puerto del Carmen and Arrecife, though not frequently enough to build a day around — the Lanzarote bus network explains where it works and where it does not. Most visitors drive; parking at the marina is straightforward and free, which is not the case in Puerto del Carmen.

So, is it worth the trip?

Yes, for an evening, and yes as a departure point if you are taking a boat anywhere. Puerto Calero is small, it is manufactured, and it makes no claim to be an old fishing village — there was never a village here. What it is, is very well done: quiet, low, white, blue-shuttered and open to the sea, with proper restaurants and a harbour full of boats going somewhere interesting.

Treat it as the calm, grown-up alternative to the strip at Puerto del Carmen rather than as a destination for a fortnight, and combine it with a catamaran morning and a drive inland. For the wider picture of what Lanzarote does best, and for the volcanic landscape that makes this the strangest island in the archipelago, start with the island's highlights.