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Puerto Del Rosario, FuerteventuraYou are here: Fuerteventura > Information Pages > Towns & Villages > Puerto Del Rosario
Since 1860 Puerto Del Rosario has been the capital of Fuerteventura and is where over half of the population of the island live and work. The town was known until 1956 as Puerto Cabras (Port of the Goats, because the goat herds were watered in the nearby ravine), but was renamed by the government in an attempt to make it sound more appealing to tourists when tourism first began to take hold of the island.
As the ships came to Fuerteventura with provisions, so the harbour grew until it became the bustling port that you can see today, with every kind of boat, from container ships to ferries and cruise liners now docking there regularly. Culturally the island has been fairly poor, but with the influx of Spanish and other ethnic settlers, coupled with the better education that is now freely available to all, the capital is slowly seeing more cultural and modern advances. For example the town now has the Auditorium which regularly hosts music and theatre evenings, along with art exhibitions and other matters of popular interest. Modern Puerto Del Rosario is a clean place with wide avenues and streets, with white, African style buildings shaped like cubes with flat roofs, generally two storeys high. The town itself is not really geared towards the tourist, with relatively few places of interest to visit. The harbour front is definitely worth a stroll though, to look at the interesting sculptures that are displayed along the promenade (you can also see a variety of sculptures by local artists in the centre of most roundabouts in the town - see photgraph shown), and also for the pavement cafes which are dotted around. The best thing about the capital is the shopping, with an abundance of shops of all kinds, with prices much lower than in the tourist resorts. Do not look for the ‘shopping centre’ that you are used to back at home, you must be prepared to walk to discover the delightful clothes boutiques, where you can pick up one-of-a-kind fashions for excellent prices. For the gentlemen there is always the large church in the town centre, which just happens to have a licensed bar operating in its grounds! |
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The town sprang into life just over 200 years ago, when the livestock traders and salt meat traders realised that this area could be turned in to a port of transit, storage and loading. Then the advent of commercial shipping to the island meant that a coastal location for the capital made a lot more sense than the location of the original capital of Betancuria in the centre of the island.