Arrecife; Saturday, 14 March, 2020

I had a filling breakfast in the hotel before heading out to walk over to the main intercity bus terminal on the opposite side of the city centre. It was difficult to tell at 09:30 in the morning if it was quiet just because it was early on a Saturday or if people were staying in their houses.

I got to the bus station in time to pick up my first connection of the day – the scenic route 16 out towards the north coast of the island, through some of the main volcano and lava fields in the centre of the island. As the bus was quiet I was able to get a good seat and take quite a few photos on the very impressive journey past multiple volcanoes.

I hopped off the bus in the town of Tinajo, about 4km from the end of the buses route, mainly as it was the last town the bus stopped in before reaching the end of the route so I had about 20 minutes to have a quick look around and take some more photos before the bus returned and I headed back into Arrecife.

The bus arrived just before 12, giving me about 5 minutes to make the connection onto the next bus – this time out to the town of Teguise, located in the middle of the island. Until Arrecife’s port importance propelled it to the status of capital of the Island, Teguise had been the capital. I had a long wander around the former capital taking in the views, in particular of the main market square. I stopped in a little café for a quick lunch, before heading back to the bus stop and hopping on another bus, this time to continue north up to the Northern coast of the island.

The town of Caleta de Famara is located on the north coast and is partly surrounded by a large cliff ridge and sand dunes. From the beach it’s possible to see the island of La Graciosa, as well as a number of people surfing as the waves were pretty impressive here.

I had a nice wander along the beach, taking in the sea air and the sights, before heading to a bar near the bus stop for a quick afternoon drink and a snack whilst I waited for the bus onto my penultimate destination of the day.

The bus took me back south, through Teguise and down to the South coast seaside resort of Costa Teguise. Here I wandered down to the seafront and had a long walk along the promenade that links the multiple beaches of this resort location together. I stopped at a nice looking ice cream parlour in the centre of town for quick ice cream before finishing off my walk by making my way back to the bus stop.

The bus from Costa Teguise not only serves the Intercity bus station in Arrecife, but also the local bus station near the hotel, so I stayed on the bus round to here and then walked back along the beach towards the hotel.

I contemplated popping back into the hotel and changing into my swimming things as the beach and sea did look very tempting, but on getting back into the hotel it was to see that the news had moved fast during the day, with one of the UK main holiday airlines, Jet2, cancelling all their flights and the whole of Spain poised to go onto a full lock down. Thoughts of heading out onto the beach ended there as I spent a good hour on the phone waiting to get through to British Airways to confirm that my flight would still be operating. By the time I’d finished that – and read up fully on the shutdown details – it was dark.

I was going to have a pre-dinner drink, but the restrictions on the hotel meant that they had to close both their top floor bar and restaurant and now the only open facility was the buffet restaurant, so instead I headed there for dinner before returning to my room. On getting back to my room I found a letter under the door explaining that as a precaution they would be introducing a shift system for breakfast and dinner based on floor number to reduce the number of people in the restaurant at any one time. This meant that if I wanted breakfast I had to be down for 8am. So with nothing to do and an early breakfast call I turned in for the night.