Mirador de Morro Velosa

Morro Velosa gives you the clearest single explanation of what Fuerteventura actually is. From roughly 650 metres up — sources differ a little on the exact figure — you look down the whole Betancuria valley and out across the flat brown plains that run north to the coast. On a good day you can pick out Montaña Tindaya, the pale smudge of the Corralejo dunes, El Cotillo on the west coast and the outline of Lanzarote beyond. Nothing else on the island puts this much of it into one frame.

Clarity is everything here, and it varies. Winter and spring mornings are usually sharpest; summer afternoons often bring haze, and a calima blowing sand off the Sahara can cut the view to a few kilometres. Cloud sits on this ridge more often than on the coast, so a grey morning inland does not necessarily mean a grey day back at your apartment. Come early, and bring a layer — it is regularly several degrees cooler up here than on the beach.

César Manrique, the Lanzarote artist who shaped how the Canaries build for visitors, designed the mirador, and the restraint shows. The structure is low and stone-faced, half-set into the hillside so it barely reads as a building from the road, and the interior turns to a long curved window that does all the work. Inside there is a small exhibition on the island's volcanic formation with a relief model of Fuerteventura, plus a café and a garden of native plants. Opening is usually Tuesday to Saturday during the day, with Sundays and Mondays closed — worth confirming, as the hours have shifted before.

The drive is half the reward. The FV-30 climbs out of Betancuria through the eroded Betancuria Rural Park in a series of tight bends, the rock changing colour as you gain height. A kilometre or so further north is the Mirador de Guise y Ayose, where two large bronze statues of Fuerteventura's last pre-conquest kings stand facing the valley — free, always open and worth the extra two minutes. Between the two viewpoints and the village below, this is the best half hour of driving on the island.