How long is the Cueva del Llano lava tube?

Surveys have mapped roughly 648 metres, with the final stretch difficult even for specialists. When guided tours ran, visitors saw about the first 400 to 450 metres, which was lit and laid with a walkway.

What is the blind spider in Cueva del Llano?

Maiorerus randoi, a small eyeless arachnid related to harvestmen rather than to true spiders. It is endemic to this single cave, which is a large part of why the site is legally protected.

What else is nearby if the cave is closed?

Villaverde and Lajares sit ten minutes from Corralejo and make a good short loop: the craft shops and Saturday market at Lajares, the volcano trail up Calderón Hondo, and the drive on to El Cotillo for lunch. None of it depends on a museum being open.

The collapsed volcanic sinkhole entrance to Cueva del Llano, with the visitor centre building behind, near Villaverde

Photo: Frank Vincentz (CC BY-SA 3.0), via Wikimedia Commons

Villaverde, Fuerteventura

Cueva del Llano

Q: Can you visit Cueva del Llano?

Not the cave itself. The lava tube has been closed to the public since a rockfall at its entrance and no reopening has been announced. The interpretation centre above ground has opened on and off, so telephone ahead — plenty of visitors have driven out only to find the gates locked.

One of the Canaries' oldest lava tubes — and, for now, one you cannot walk into.

Cueva del Llano is a volcanic lava tube near Villaverde in northern Fuerteventura, cut by an eruption of Montaña Escanfraga estimated at more than 690,000 years old and surveyed to around 648 metres. It matters scientifically: its sediments preserve the bones of extinct island animals, and it shelters Maiorerus randoi, a blind cave arachnid found nowhere else on earth. The tube itself has been closed since a rockfall at the entrance, and the visitor centre above has opened only intermittently since — check before you drive out.

The closure, first

There is no polite way around this: the lava tube has been shut to visitors since a rockfall at the entrance, and it has stayed shut for over a decade. Reports also tie the long closure to an unresolved environmental case connected to nearby development, and no reopening date has been announced. The interpretation centre above the cave has opened at times, occasionally free of charge, but visitors regularly arrive to find the whole site locked. If the underground tour is your reason for coming, telephone the island's museum network before you set off.

That said, the site is a short detour off the road between Corralejo and the interior, so it costs little to try if you are passing. When the centre is open, the exhibition explains how the tube formed and what has been found inside it, which is more interesting than it sounds. What you cannot currently do is walk the tunnel — and the guidebooks and listing sites that still promise a 45-minute underground tour are out of date.

What is actually down there

The tube was cut by lava flowing from Montaña Escanfraga, and estimates put it at more than 690,000 years old — remarkable, because lava tubes usually collapse or fill within tens of thousands of years. Surveys have traced around 648 metres of passage, of which roughly the first 400 to 450 metres were lit and walkable when tours still ran. Over that time the floor filled with sediment, and those layers turned out to be a record of the island's climate and its lost fauna, including bones of animals no longer found here.

The cave's most famous resident is Maiorerus randoi, a small blind arachnid — a harvestman relative rather than a web-spinning spider — known from this cave and nowhere else on the planet. It is one of the reasons the site is legally protected, and one of the reasons conservationists have not pushed hard for the tunnel to reopen. Bats have long been associated with the cave as well, though the current state of any colony is not something reported reliably. If the science is what draws you, the Museo Arqueológico in Betancuria covers the island's natural and human prehistory and is reliably open.