Wednesday 5 December 2012

Fuerteventura

by Kompass Karten

After more than a year on Fuerte, the time has come to get a proper map of this island. At last. Google Maps is useless for place names: in the best case, they are not there. In the worst case, they are years out of date. (No, there is no street in Corralejo named Avenida del General Franco). I don’t know about GPS. I never seen anybody using GPS here anyway.

This 1:50000 Kompass map is... good. Not perfect — well, nothing is perfect — but way better than any other map I’ve seen. It is big too: 117 x 74 cm, to be precise. (The dimensions 19.5 x 11.6 x 0.9 cm quoted by Amazon refer to a folded map.) So if you find the art of map folding nontrivial, you may wish to practice. Even so, our beautiful island is rather long, so they had to print its southern part on the other side. The legend is in German, Spanish, English, French and Italian. Naturally, the place names are in Spanish, but one can come across a number of random German words or phrases (usually printed in red) which are left on their own. Here they are for you:

100 Jahre alter Plattenweg100-year-old paved path
Achtung! Gezeiten beachtenAttention! Beware of the tide
Baden gefährlich!Swimming is dangerous!
Bauernmuseumfarming museum
Felsenkapellerock chapel
Freilichtmuseumopen air museum
Genehmigungspflichtig (Rathaus La Oliva)subject to permission (from La Oliva Town Hall)
nur mit Genehmigungonly with permission
Kulturlandschaftcultural landscape
Landschaftsschutzgebietlandscape conservation area
Museumsdorfmuseum village
Naturdenkmalnatural monument
Schiffswrackshipwreck
Siedlung(early historic) settlement
Surfschulesurf school

Finally, the enclosed Lexicon (a short guide to the island) is in German only. But you don’t buy a map to read a guide. Pretty much disposable, unless you really want to know how to say gofio in German.

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