Fuerteventura is covered in windmills — dozens of them, standing on ridges and at the edges of villages all over the island — and they come in two distinct types with two different names: the molino, tall, round and turning on its cap, and the molina, squat, square and turning nothing but its sails. The distinction is not pedantry. It marks a real technological change, and once you know it you cannot drive across the island without sorting every mill you pass into one box or the other.

They exist for the same reason the island is famous with windsurfers: Fuerteventura is flat, treeless and relentlessly windy. The north-east trade winds blow across it for most of the year with nothing to stop them. That wind is useless for almost everything except turning a sail, and on an island with no rivers and therefore no water mills, wind was the only power available.

What they ground was not principally bread flour. It was gofio — toasted grain, milled to a fine flour, the staple that kept Canarians alive through centuries in which there was often nothing else. The mills and the food are inseparable, and that is the key to understanding why there are so many of them.

Molino and molina: telling them apart

In Canarian Spanish the two words are not simply masculine and feminine forms of the same thing. They describe different machines.

The molino is the older and grander design: a tall cylindrical or slightly conical stone tower, usually two or three floors, with a wooden cap on top carrying the sail axle. The whole cap rotates so the sails can be turned into the wind. The grinding stones sit inside the tower, driven down through a vertical shaft. It is the classic Mediterranean tower mill, and on Fuerteventura most date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The molina is the local invention and the more interesting of the two. It is a low square or rectangular building of stone with a flat roof, and on top of the roof sits a wooden frame carrying the sails. The machinery is mounted on the roof structure rather than inside a rotating cap, and the mill house below is simply a workspace. It is generally credited to the second half of the nineteenth century, and it spread because it was cheaper to build, easier to maintain and — crucially — could be operated by one person, often a woman, working at ground level rather than climbing between floors of a tower.

A quick field test from the car: if the building is tall and round, it is a molino. If it is low and square with a wooden contraption sitting on the roof like a hat, it is a molina. Both are common on Fuerteventura; the molina is the one you will not have seen anywhere else.

Why this island and not the others

Three conditions had to coincide, and Fuerteventura is the only island in the archipelago where all three did at once.

First, wind: steady, strong and reliable, with no mountains to break it. Second, grain: Fuerteventura was the granary of the Canaries, growing wheat, barley and later maize on its dry plains and exporting to the greener but steeper islands. Third, no water: the wetter islands could mill with water wheels, and Tenerife and La Palma did. Fuerteventura has effectively no permanent surface water at all.

The result is that an island with a small population accumulated an extraordinary number of mills — figures in the high double digits are commonly given for surviving structures, with many more lost. They cluster around the old agricultural centres: Antigua, La Oliva, Tefía, Villaverde, Tiscamanita. Our page on farming and the terraced hills covers the wider system these mills sat inside, and Fuerteventura itself explains how thoroughly the island's character comes from that flat, dry geography.

Gofio: what the mills were for

Gofio is grain — wheat, barley, maize, or a mixture — that is toasted before milling rather than after. That order matters. Toasting first gives a flour that is already cooked, keeps for months without going rancid, and can be eaten by simply mixing it with water, milk, broth or honey. No oven required, which on an island short of firewood was the point.

The pre-Hispanic islanders were doing this with hand querns long before the conquest; the Spanish brought the mill technology, not the food. Gofio survived the arrival of bread, survived the twentieth century and is still eaten daily — stirred into fish stew, rolled into a ball with banana, given to children for breakfast. It is covered properly in gofio, the Canarian staple, and it turns up in a surprising number of the dishes listed in what to eat in Fuerteventura.

A handful of gofio mills still operate commercially on the islands, though almost all now run on electricity. If you see a working molino de gofio sign on a village street, it is a shop, and the flour it sells is fresher and better than the supermarket packets.

The detail that explains the sails

Here is the piece worth carrying away. A Fuerteventura mill does not have sails like a Dutch windmill — broad lattice frames covered in canvas. It has a larger number of narrow triangular canvas sails, often six or eight of them, rigged on thin spars, and the miller adjusted power by furling or unfurling individual sails rather than by changing the whole rig.

That design comes from the eastern Mediterranean, and it arrived in the Canaries the way most things did — by ship. It is the same rig you see on the windmills of Crete and the Cyclades. The islands sat on the Atlantic trade routes and absorbed technology from every direction, and the mills of Fuerteventura are, structurally, Greek islands' mills adapted to a volcanic archipelago off Africa. The wind here is steadier than in northern Europe, which is precisely why a fine-adjustment rig makes sense: the miller is trimming, not surviving gusts.

The mills you can actually go inside

Most of the island's mills are private, ruined or simply standing in a field. A few have been restored and opened, and these are the ones to aim at.

Opening hours and admission charges at all of these are set by the local councils, vary by season, and have changed more than once. Check the current details on the relevant municipal or museum site before building a day around them, particularly for Monday visits and for anything in the middle of the afternoon.

Driving a mill route

The mills are scattered along the island's interior, not on the coast, which means a hire car and the FV-20 spine road. A half-day loop that works: start from Caleta de Fuste or the capital, head inland to Antigua for the museum, continue south to Tiscamanita for the interpretation centre, then swing north through Tefía and Villaverde towards La Oliva before dropping to the coast at Corralejo.

Roads across the middle of the island are quiet, straight and in good condition, and the driving is the easiest in the archipelago — nothing like the mountain hairpins of the western islands. The main hazards are goats and the wind itself, which pushes a small hire car around on exposed stretches; our page on driving in the Canaries covers the rest. Public buses reach the main inland villages but not conveniently between them, so the loop is a car job.

Photograph the mills in the last hour of daylight. They stand on ridges and skylines with nothing around them, and low sun gives the sail frames and the stone their texture. At midday on a hazy day they flatten into grey shapes against grey ground.

Why they stopped, and why they came back

Mechanised milling and imported flour killed the windmills through the twentieth century, as they did everywhere. Cheap grain arrived by ship, diesel mills did the job in any weather, and the island's rural population shrank as people left for the towns or emigrated. By the 1970s most mills were roofless.

What brought them back was identity rather than economics. As tourism reshaped the island, the mills became a symbol of what Fuerteventura had been before the hotels — they appear on local signage, tourist boards and municipal logos — and public money went into restoring a selection of them. It is the same impulse that preserved village architecture elsewhere in the archipelago, described in traditional Canarian architecture. That the restored mills are now surrounded by twenty-first-century wind turbines doing the same job at industrial scale is an irony the island seems comfortable with.

Fitting it into a holiday

Nobody flies to Fuerteventura for windmills. But a beach holiday here has a shape to it — several days of sand and wind, and then a day when you want to see the island — and the mill route is a very good use of that day, especially combined with the old capital at Betancuria, which sits directly on the same inland circuit.

Pair it with a cheese stop. Fuerteventura's majorero goat's cheese is the island's other great agricultural product and is sold at farm shops along the same inland roads; Canarian cheeses explains what to look for. Grain and goats, milled flour and hard cheese — that was the island's diet, and the interior is where both came from.

Before you go

Treat the mills as a lens rather than a checklist. You are not going to tick off sixty structures, and a photograph of the fifth ruined tower looks much like the first. Visit one restored mill properly — Antigua is the best bet — learn which way the cap turns and what a molina is, and then spend the rest of the day noticing them from the car.

That is the trick with this particular attraction: an hour of understanding turns the whole island into the exhibit. After it, every low square building with a wooden frame on the roof that you pass on the way to the beach is legible, and the rest of what the island offers reads slightly differently too.