Hotels in Las Playitas

Las Playitas

Las Playitas is a small fishing village turned sports destination on the south-eastern coast of Fuerteventura, in the municipality of Tuineje, home to roughly seven hundred permanent residents and set in a sheltered bay framed by arid volcanic ridges. The village lies about six kilometres east of Gran Tarajal along the FV-512, some forty-four kilometres and fifty minutes south of Fuerteventura Airport, and around fifty-six kilometres from the Jandía resorts at Morro Jable. Its beach is a crescent of dark volcanic sand mixed with rounded pebbles, with calm shallow water, a lifeguard service, showers and a beach volleyball court, making it a safe and unhurried alternative to the island's busier golden-sand resorts. Las Playitas is best known internationally for the Playitas Resort high-performance training centre, whose facilities include an eight-lane heatable fifty-metre Olympic swimming pool, a six-lane four-hundred-metre athletics track and a seven-hundred-square-metre gym. The resort adds tennis, padel and pickleball courts, a fully equipped bike centre and a marked network of running routes ranging from one-point-four to twenty-three kilometres through the surrounding hills. The village hosts the Challenge Fuerteventura triathlon and maintains a long-standing training agreement with the Swedish Olympic Committee, which is why Scandinavian athletes and cycling teams fill its hotels through the winter months. Playitas Golf, an eighteen-hole par-67 course measuring 4,824 metres, opened in 2009 to a design by John Chilver-Stainer and winds between lava outcrops with views over the Atlantic. Six kilometres up a switchback road stands the Faro de la Entallada, a twelve-metre square tower with a Moorish-influenced design by architect Carlos Alcón, whose focal plane sits 196 metres above the sea — the third highest in the Canary Islands — at the archipelago's closest point to Africa, barely a hundred kilometres away. Inland rise the Cuchillos de Vigán, a Natural Monument of knife-edged eroded ridges that count among the oldest volcanic formations in the Canaries and offer hiking with almost no crowds. Winter conditions are exceptional both for training and for a quiet beach holiday, with January and February highs near twenty-one degrees, about seven hours of daily sunshine and steady north-easterly trade winds of fifteen to twenty-five kilometres per hour, all on an island declared a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 2009 and a Starlight Reserve in 2015.