The 9 km Beach That Fills and Drains With the Tide
Sotavento is not a single beach but a 9-kilometre arc on the Jandía Peninsula's eastern edge, running from Risco del Paso in the north down toward La Pared and the protected Costa Calma sector. The defining feature is the inner lagoon — a sand-bottomed pool that fills on the rising tide and partially drains on the falling, leaving exposed sandbars and ankle-deep flatwater that has made this beach the global default for freestyle kiting. The sandbars themselves shift season to season; storm surges and Atlantic erosion redraw the lagoon's outline, and locals will tell you the 'River Mouth' zone of 2018 is not the River Mouth of today. The beach is Spain's southernmost European-facing strip of sand and sits inside the Jandía Natural Park.
Mahorero Roots Beneath the Resort Coast
Before Costa Calma's hotels and the PWA banners, the Jandía Peninsula was home to the Mahoreros (also called Majos) — the Berber-descended indigenous people of Fuerteventura, sharing Guanche ancestry with the rest of the Canary archipelago. The peninsula was historically a separate kingdom, divided from the rest of the island by the Pared de Jandía, a low stone wall whose remnants still trace across the isthmus near La Pared village. Spanish conquest in the 15th century displaced and absorbed the Mahorero population, but the place names (Jandía, Cofete, Morro Jable) and the dry-stone gavias and goat-herding traces in the interior carry the older layer. KTP frames this as context, not costume — the kite scene sits on top of a much older landscape.
PWA Since 1986 — One of the Sport's Longest-Running Pro Stops
The PWA World Cup Fuerteventura at Sotavento is one of the longest-running professional windsurfing and kiteboarding events on the planet — windsurfing has been contested here since 1986, and the kiteboarding stop has been added and run continuously since 2004. The contest beach in front of Hangloose's compound at Risco del Paso transforms each July and August: scoring zones marked with buoys, a media tower on the dune line, and the world's top freestylers and slalom riders rotating through heats while the Alisio holds steady at 30+ knots. For travelling kiters, watching the contest from the beach is a free education — Gisela Pulido, Bruna Kajiya, the Lenny brothers, the entire Big Air circuit have all logged sessions here.
Cofete, Casa Winter, and the Folklore of the Wild South
Drive the dirt road over the Jandía massif and you drop into Cofete — a 12-kilometre wind-blown beach on the Atlantic-facing side, backed by 800-metre cliffs and one of the most remote stretches of coast in Europe. Halfway down sits Casa Winter, a stone villa built in the 1930s by German engineer Gustav Winter. Local folklore (and a steady stream of YouTube videos) ties the house to alleged Nazi U-boat operations and SS officer extraction routes after WWII. Historians find the evidence thin and the stories more atmospheric than substantiated — KTP frames Casa Winter as folklore, not history. What is real: Cofete is unswimmable for most of the year (currents are lethal, wind is brutal), but the drive itself is one of the great Canarian road trips, and on a calm day the beach is a place to stand alone at the edge of Africa.