May the magnetic force be with you

A new Star Wars film is adding to the powerful pull of sand dune-rich Fuerteventura, says Linda Cookson

It was my first visit to Fuerteventura and I was staying in the north of the island in the pretty port of Corralejo. But right now, under the brightest of blue skies, I was bouncing along a dusty track in a dusty Jeep through a wild open countryside spiked with agave plants.

I’d heard that earlier in the year the island had been a key location for the forthcoming film, Solo: A Star Wars Story (due for UK release in May). I was on my way to chat to a local lady who had been given a small speaking part in the film. As she lived out in the countryside, in the nearby village of Lajares, I’d decided to rent a Jeep and turn my stay into a mini-road trip.

Vera, 73, was a delight – tiny, dreadlocked, and as colourful as a small exotic bird. She e lived in a remote smallholding g on the edge of the village, surrounded unded by rescue dogs and cats, , and made pottery and wood carvings rvings as a hobby. We settled down at a table draped with an Indian hanging ing and strewn with little pots ts of poster paints, and I got cracking with my questions. Here was my chance to lift the lid on the world of moviemaking.

Well, that was the theory. In reality, my fledgling career as an investigative journalist was over before it began.

What could she tell me about her part?

Well, nothing actually – everyone had to sign a confidentiality agreement. Her costume? The set? It was all top-secret.

Was the story a winner? She had no idea – the extras weren’t given scripts. “Shall I put the kettle on?” she said, as an awkward silence started to settle. So we shared a pot of tea and talked about the island instead.

Vera first arrived in Fuerteventura from Amsterdam in 1994. She had no intention of staying, but has been there ever since. “It has a high magnetic field for foreigners,” she said

The island is famous for its goats, and its award-winning cheese is a top local delicacy

with a smile. smile Intrigued, I asked her what w she found so special. “It’s “not simply the beaches,” beache she said. “Though “Th that’s usually usu what brings people peo here in the first fir place.” (Fuerteventura (F is a magnet m for windsurfers and kiteboarders: the only Canary Island with more than t 90 miles of mostly white sand beaches, and with constant cons warm breezes from the Sahara.) “It’s something much bigger than that. It’s in the landscapes, in the light, in the skies. It’s good for the soul.”

The strange paradox of Fuerteventura is that although it’s the second largest of the Canaries, after Tenerife, it’s also the archipelago’s emptiest island. There are just 115,000 or so residents dispersed over 640 square miles. Most, predictably, gravitate towards the main tourist resorts that line the stretch of coast running due south from the airport. The far south’s sun-soaked Jandía peninsula is a near-solid wall of hotels. But leave all of that behind and head for the interior or the rugged western coast, and you can travel for miles without seeing a soul.

As I soon discovered, simply by driving around quite randomly, there are enchanting hidden villages far from the hurlyburly, and lonely, eerily beautiful vistas lost in heat and silence.

From Vera’s farmstead in Lajares, I headed south through a spaghetti western landscape of rolling volcanic fields and hills (known as malpaís) – a mesmeric, pale-golden ripple of rocky folds. The rounded, higher mountains in the hinterland glowed like light bulbs, their surfaces adrift in sooty shadows from the low clouds hovering above them.

There wasn’t a human in sight. Here and there were clumps of euphorbia plants, like squiggles of wire wool. Here and there were drystone walls drained of colour by the hot sun blazing relentlessly from wide, open skies. And everywhere were herds of ambling goats, their presence signalled bizarrely by successions of red warning triangles showing leaping stags. (Apparently the EU has no recognised road sign for goat alerts, so the authorities have had to improvise.)

Fuerteventura is famous for its goats. Until recently, the standing joke was that there were more goats on the island than people. Nowadays, the island’s award-winning Majorero goat’s cheese is one of the top local arranged from £1,375pp, including transfers between the resorts.

Airlines that fly to Fuerteventura (from a number of UK airports) include British Airways, easyJet, Jet2, Ryanair, Thomas Cook and Tui. For best fares, see flight comparison websites skyscanner.com and momondo.com.

Corralejo, in the north, is about 25 miles (40km) from the airport – about 35 minutes by taxi (€50/£44.25). Travelling by bus

(€5 one-way) involves a change at Puerto del Rosario (number 3, then number 6); Morro Jable, in the south, is about 53 miles (85km) from Fuerteventura’s airport – about 70 minutes by taxi (€100) or one hour and 40 minutes by the number 10 bus (€9.70, one-way). See tiadhe.com for timetables. delicacies. I tucked into a hefty slice of it when I made my first pit-stop, after dirt-tracking westwards to the picture-book harbour of Los Molinos.

Los Molinos is the smallest fishing village on the island – a cluster of impossibly cute sugar-cube houses edged in red, green or blue. There are colourful boats, a small beach and a single rustic restaurant shack perched above the bay and overlooked by looming cliffs. Pon, the restaurant’s owner (his name is a childhood nickname), has run it for nearly 30 years, and has never tired of the soaring sea-spray and crashing of untamed waters against black rocks. When he

SPACE AGE Parts of starring Alden Ehrenreich, were shot at La Pared