Fuerteventura's Airports - from 1942 to today

Описание: Fuerteventura's Airports - from 1942 to today

First airport near Tefia

We’ve come about 30 kilometers inland. This bit of barren land at Tefia was the site of the first airport For those who know the island, La Alcogida, the ecomuseum of country life is just over there, the village of Los Molinos is on the coast down there and this fine windmill, or molino as they are called here, is a well-known landmark.

The story of an airport being built here actually started at the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939. General Franco needed somewhere to keep all his political prisoners from the losing side well away from mainland Spain. So they obtained this bit of land and built a concentration camp here to keep them. The second World War came along and when Jandia in the south of the island was turned over for the Germans to use, the unlucky prisoners from here were taken to build the road over the mountain to Cofete.

During the war the Spanish decided they needed a military airfield to protect the Canary Islands and they built it on the flat ground here, well out of the range of naval guns. There were a couple of supply flights every week and after the war the facility was turned over to civilian use. Iberia provided a regular service from the mainland.

By the 1950s the authorities decided the needed to move to a new airport. Partly because getting here involved a long trip on dirt tracks but more importantly, Fuerteventura’s known for strong winds and with all the hills around here the wind was unpredictable and it caused a lot of hairy landings.

How bad the winds can be was demonstrated years after the airport was moved. In 1972 a group of paratroopers on a training exercise were caught in the wind and lost control of their parachutes. Thirteen of them died. They are remembered on a memorial there.

Anyway the airport was moved away in 1952. The government took the opportunity to bring back the prison camp. This time they rounded up vagrants from the Spanish mainland and dumped them here.

Nowadays the island council owns the site. They do agricultural research and they’ve got a little astronomical observatory in there too.

Los Estancos Airport

Los Estancos airport was located on top of the hill above Puerto del Rosario.

The roundabout is where the middle of the runway used to be, going across the road. So any time there was a plane landing or taking off the road had to be closed. If you look on Google Earth you can still make out the runway on the ground.

The other thing that has survived is the terminal building. It was in danger of decay for a few years but it has been restored and now it’s the centrepiece of a new technology park that’s developing around us.

This airport served from 1952 until 1969. Its problem was that the runway was too short to as passenger planes were getting bigger. Flights coming from Europe had to land in Lanzarote and passengers transferred to a smaller plane to come over to Fuerteventura. That’s why a new location down on the coast at El Matorral with plenty of space was chosen. Which is just as well as in the 1980s Fuerteventura finally started to catch up with the tourist boom which was happening on the other islands. The airport has had to be expanded to what we have today.

I added an old photo showing a Spantax DC3 Dakota EC-BED taking off.

Fuerteventura’s latest airport is a modern and usually fairly efficient modern airport that can handle over five million passengers a year. Obviously it’s vital for the island economy as tourism is so important. The airport opened in September 1969.

Thanks to Duncan Gray for his help. You can buy his guide book to Fuerteventura here - https://geni.us/yYO9pZ

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Aircraft sounds https://freesound.org/s/143559/ and https://freesound.org/s/143560/