🏝Chapter Twelve — The Stargate and the Caves of Ayuy

Memory is funny.
Years soften the details,
but the energy of certain places never fades.

That’s how it is with our first trips on Fuerteventura —
I don’t remember every conversation, every stop, every day…
but I remember the feeling.
The land imprinting itself on me.

And the first place where this happened was Sicasumbre.

⭐ Sicasumbre — The Stargate of Fuerteventura

The “Observatorio Astronómico Sicasumbre” wasn’t just a viewpoint.
It felt like stepping onto another world.

We drove into the middle of the island, weaving through golden mountains and dried riverbeds, until the road simply climbed into the sky. The landscape stretched beneath us like a forgotten planet, untouched and ancient.

And then, at the top —
the stone star.

Carved right into the ground.
A compass of the cosmos.
A map of light translated into stone,
left for anyone whose eyes could still understand such things.

Standing in that star,
with nothing around us but wind, mountains, silence,
and the endless open sky…

It truly felt like being outside Earth.

The air was different there — thinner, sharper, older.
A place where the boundaries between worlds felt loose,
as if the veil between timelines was only a thin breath.

Even now, nearly a decade later,
I can still feel the shiver in my chest when I remember that view.

The island stretched out in every direction,
raw and golden and infinite,
and for the second time since moving, I thought:

“This is not just land.
This is a portal.”

The Caves of Ajuy — Mouths of the Ancient Earth

Our next journey took us to Ajuy —
a small fishing village in the Pájara municipality,
quiet, rugged, and holding one of the oldest geological formations in the entire Canary Islands.

And the road to get there?
If I thought Gran Canaria’s mountain roads were narrow,
Fuerteventura said,
“Hold my cerveza.”

The drive wound through black volcanic-stone cliffs,
so steep and sharp it felt like crossing the spine of a sleeping dragon.
The roads cut through lava fields,
dark and ancient,
a reminder of how young humanity is compared to the island’s bones.

Even though the mountains here are lower than Gran Canaria’s,
the sensation was stronger:

like being a mountain goat on wheels.

And no —
I was not the one driving.
Not a chance, lol.

But the reward at the end of the road was worth every curve:

the Caves of Ajuy.

Massive.
Breathing.
Primordial.

The ocean roared at their feet like a beast at the boundary of creation.
The wind tore through the cliffs with a voice that seemed older than time.
And inside the caves, darkness swallowed sound in a way that felt sacred,
like stepping into the womb of the Earth.

Some places on Fuerteventura whisper.
Ajuy does not.

Ajuy speaks.

It speaks of:

volcanic fire

ancient oceans

land being born

worlds rising from the deep

the raw, untamed beginning of everything

Walking inside those caves,
you don’t just see the island —
you feel its past,
its birth,
its soul.

🌀 The Mountain Goat Roads and the Ancient Pulse

Driving between these sacred points,
the feeling of being on another planet returned again and again.

Gran Canaria had awakened memory.
Fuerteventura awakened the elemental.

Here, the land feels stripped down to its essence —
wind, rock, sea, silence.
Nothing hides.
Nothing pretends.

The roads carved through volcanic mountains made me grip my seat like a nervous passenger,
but inside, something deeper was laughing —
a strange excitement,
a sense of wildness waking up.

Like the island was saying:

“Welcome.
Now hold on.”

Because Fuerteventura doesn’t cradle you gently.
It confronts you.
Activates you.
Initiates you.

And those first trips —
Sicasumbre, Ajuy, the volcanic roads —
were the beginning of that initiation.