Slight problem with today - I needed to make space on the SD card and stupidly deleted the images before I'd saved them to my laptop. duh. Still, its a good excuse to go back ;)
We headed west to Pajara, stopping for coffee and a bit of tourism in the town. The church is lovely, with 'Aztec-style' carvings around the doorway and the noria (water wheel) just opposite was being demonstrated by an elderly Majorero (Fuerteventuran) and his burro.
From here we headed south and had a splendid view of Mta Hendida where subaerial basalt and trachybasalt lavas sit unconformably above an erosional surface in the basal complex seamount series. The older shield stage lavas are completely absent so 3 Ma worth of rock has gone, perhaps by flank collapse.
A winding road led up to a mirador on the col between Hendida and Sisacumbre with some exceptional views and at least 3 options for a stunning lunch location. Just down the hill from here we stopped at a T-junction to examine an exposure of dykes cutting green, altered basalts of the seamount series... still playing 'spot the pillows' though they hyaloclastites are fairly convincing!
Finally we headed down to La Pared and through the urbanizacion to the Punta de Guadalupe where, after a coffee stop, we went down onto the beach to look at the weathered breccias from subaerial cones that make up the shore platform. These are thought to represent the transitional stage from seamount formation to the point where the volcano broke surface and became an island. Shiny brown palagonitised surfaces were also much in evidence here.
A fantastic location to end the week on... though I'd saved some goodies for the 5 who were staying on for another few days.
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