Las Palmas - Playa de Las Canteras

We had some noisy neighbours that kept us up a bit last night so we took our time this morning getting underway. The weather forecast was for partly cloudy skies and a high of 22C. The beach on the north end of the island was promoted as one of the best beaches on the island and has an extensive promenade so we thought, probably not warm enough to go sit on the beach but let's go and walk the promenade and have lunch. It was about 5 km away so we decided to take the car. Traffic is fairly heavy here given that it is a city of about 400,000. The Spanish are sort of crazy drivers and every car has a horn. We successfully arrived at the parking garage at Playa de Las Canteras, the beach. What a great parking garage! Every space has a light above it, red for occupied, green for vacant that made looking for a space easy.

After surfacing from the parking garage, we were at the west end of the wide promenade that ran for several km along the beach. It was high tide with not too much beach showing, overcast and a little windy. I was glad I had a fleece on.

There were people just strolling or sitting watching the waves.

Not long after, the sun and sunbathers emerged and the temperature skyrocketed.

We walked the length of the promenade to the sailing club and saw them loading up a number of traditional looking boats on trailers after a weekend regatta. These were double ended very traditional lateen rigged 5.5 m sailboats and apparently there is a regatta circuit for them in the Canary Is. From what I was able to determine that are "Barquillos of 5 meters of Vela Latina", whatever that means.

The tide was going out and the natural reef that shelters the beach was emerging from the waves.
We stopped at a cafe for a leisurely lunch and watched the beach activities.

Some of the distant clouds began to clear and we could clearly see the peak of Teide in the island of Tenerife on the horizon.

The waves breaking on the reef produce a lot of spray which made for an interesting photo when looking westward into the sun!

We successfully made it back to our place through the traffic and spent a leisurely evening with a short walk to one of the many restaurants for supper. Thankfully our neighbours were quiet tonight and we got a good night's sleep.