The story doesn’t begin almost 40 years ago when Costa Calma was being built, before it used to look like this……. not a hotel in sight, not even a little fishing village, pretty much desert from coast to coast. It doesn’t begin 700 years or so ago when the French man Jean de Bethencourt first arrived here claiming the islands for the Spanish (it was their money that financed the trip). It doesn’t begin when the Guanche people arrived and made their homes here (no one still knows exactly where from and how they got here!) But it begins 20 million years before the first people walked on this earth (or so we think) As this was such a long time ago dates are a little broad; our story could start when the, then newly formed Jurassic sea bed some 3000 meters below us started moving away from the North Atlantic Ridge at the breathtaking speed of….. as fast as your finger nails grow! But that wouldn’t be much of a story!
Lets start our story when the African Plate (that we are on) moves over a very thin, incredibly hot area of the Earths mantle, (think growing fingernails!) I’m not about to explain in detail plate tectonics or hot spots but here is a diagram…. This hot magma finds a weak place in the ocean crust and, as it’s under great pressure it forces it’s way up towards the surface. At this time it is under the ocean and gradually lava flow upon lava flow an island is born. Around 23 million years ago, give or take a million or two, Fuerteventura rose above the ocean surface, this was when the megalodon was terrifying the deep but 42 million years after dinosaurs inhabited the land.
The Atlantic ocean was smaller then too, about 860km thinner (my maths so don’t quote me!) there were some strange animals roaming the land but they kind of looked like the animals now, such as horses and elephants, a variety of birds had taken to the air and there were mammals such as otters in the water (oh watch out for the Megalodon!) So back to our island, the baby days would have been shrouded in steam, ash and chaos as the lava still fell into the ocean water, but little by little the center of the island built high and proud out of the water. But don’t think of a perfect cone like you draw when someone says “volcano!” think of a Roman shield discarded after a battle, that was what was developing as the backbone of the island, another opened up in the north and eventually about 17 million years ago the south of the island developed in a similar way. There then followed several million years of violent volcanic activity building and building the island
