Casa de los Coroneles

The Casa de los Coroneles is not currently open to the public. The Canarian Government, which runs the building as a cultural centre, closed it after structural cracking was found in the eastern tower, caused by settlement in the clay ground beneath it. The rehabilitation project covers stabilising both side towers, treating damp in the walls and restoring the building's exceptional carpentry. Work has been repeatedly delayed and no reopening date has been announced, so check by phone or on the building's own website before you build a day around it.

None of that makes the trip pointless. The house is at its most photogenic from the outside anyway, and it sits in open ground where you can walk the full length of the facade without a fence in the way. Come in the late afternoon, when the low sun picks out the shadows under the sixteen window surrounds. Then spend the rest of your time in La Oliva, which has more to see than most visitors expect.

The core of the building went up in the second half of the 17th century for the Cabrera Bethencourt family, and was reformed and enlarged during the 18th — work carried out around 1740 under Colonel Melchor de Cabrera Bethencourt — when the colonels moved their seat from Betancuria to La Oliva. Those colonels were not simply soldiers. They held military, civil, political and judicial authority over Fuerteventura at once, and ran it for generations until the last of them, Cristóbal Manrique de Lara, was stripped of the post in 1857.

The architecture says all of that out loud. Sixteen windows, eight below and eight above, each of the upper ones fronted by a wooden balcony, on an island where ordinary houses had none at all. The four corner towers are crenellated, but they were never defensive — they are a statement of rank in stone. The house fell into ruin over the twentieth century, was declared a national artistic monument in June 1979 and restored in 2006, which is why the shell you see today looks so complete.

The Ruta de los Coroneles links it with the rest of historic La Oliva: the Museo de la Cilla, in the old tithe granary, on the island's grain-growing past; the 18th-century Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria with its dark stone bell tower; and the Centro de Arte Canario, a private gallery of Canarian painting and sculpture. Together they make an easy two or three hours.