Fuerteventura Weather

Despite what you may have read elsewhere, the weather in Fuerteventura is nothing like the weather anywhere else in the world, including the other Canary Islands!

Fuerteventura Average Weather

Mallorca Average Weather

The generalization about Canary Island weather is that the northern shores of each island are wetter than the sheltered southern coasts and whilst this is certainly true for Tenerife and Lanzarote, Fuerteventura is different.

Fuerteventura is the driest of all the islands and has near perfect all year round weather.

No-one has offered me a good explanation for this, so this is my theory- the cool winds that blow almost constantly from the north, bring cold air and rain down from western Europe and this falls on the northern shores of the islands as you will have read elsewhere.

However, because of the close proximity of Lanzarote to Fuerteventura (a 12 minute boat trip away), Lanzarote acts as the northern half of Fuerteventura and gets all the rain!

As a tourist, you will find the weather here warm enough to wear shorts and tee shirts all year round during the daytime.

One feature of the weather is the wind, which contrary to what you might expect, is stronger in the summer than the winter.

This makes for good wind powered sports such as wind surfing but can 'sandblast' you on a windy day on the beach.

As a defence against the wind, tourists over the years have built stone cirlces on the more remote beaches to protect themselves.

From about Christmas to the end of March, it's possible to get a whole week of wet and cloudy weather with the temperature about 22c in the day and 16c at night.

For this reason I would recommend coming for a two week stay during these months as you'd have to be very unlucky not to get some sunny days during a fortnight.

During this time, you will see the locals with jeans, jumpers and even scarves on but as a northern European tourist you won't be acclimatized to it and it will seem warm to you.

Note that whether it's cloudy or sunny, the temperature remains almost the same, it just feels warmer when the sun is out!

April and May have daytime temperatures about 25c and it's an ideal time to visit the Canaries, everyone is happy with the weather!

June, July and August have average daytime temperatures of 27c but this average hides the fact that very occasionally we have a few days at a time when it can reach as much as 40c at mid day.

This happens when hot, dry air is drawn out from the Sahara desert and reaches as far as the island. This air may sometimes be laden with fine dust particles blown from the desert (known locally as a 'Calima').

This doesn't happen very often (hardly at all in 2007) and you may find it too hot to go out in the sun. When it does, stay in the shade, drink plenty of water and avoid spicy food!

It should be remembered that in mid summer it's not as hot here as other popular tourist destinations, we actually get tourists from mainland Spain that come here to escape the heat!

The table above shows the average conditions for Mallorca and Fuerteventura. You will see that the average temperature is actually lower in Fuerteventura in the summer than Mallorca and hotter in the winter!

Also note that compared to Mallorca, Fuerteventura's graph is almost a straight line over the whole year, and that the span of average temperatures in each month is much smaller.

From September to the end of December, the temperature slowly decreases from about 27 to 22c but it remains moslty sunny and it's an excellent time to visit, we don't start to get rainy days til mid December and it's rare even in late December not to have a day without sunbathers on the beaches.

A good indicator of the weather anywhere in the world is the incidence of air conditioning systems and central heating, in Fuerteventura it's very rare for anyone to have air-conditioning, whereas in Florida, it's rare not to.

There are a few houses in Fuerteventura with open fires and certainly if you live here you'll feel cold on some days in the winter months but putting a fan heater on for a few minutes is usually all you need.

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