The Ecology of the Maspalomas Dune Reserve: Sand, Lagoon, and Palm

The Reserva Natural Especial de las Dunas de Maspalomas protects three coupled systems on 404 hectares at the southern tip of Gran Canaria: a mobile dune field, the brackish La Charca lagoon, and a grove of Canary Island date palm. They are not three attractions that happen to sit together. They are one hydrological and aeolian unit, and the reserve was drawn to keep them connected. This page is about how that unit works, what it holds, and why it is failing.

What the reserve is actually protecting

The site was declared a protected nature reserve in 1987 and reclassified a Reserva Natural Especial — Special Nature Reserve — under Canary Islands protected-areas law in 1994. It carries an IUCN category III designation, the class used for protected features rather than large wilderness. That category is precise here: what is being protected is a process, the wind-driven movement of sand across a headland, plus the wetland and woodland that depend on it. The reserve is not large by national-park standards, but it is one of the few active barchan-and-transverse dune systems in Europe, and the only one of its kind on the Canary archipelago. Most of Gran Canaria's coast is dark basaltic grit and boulder. Maspalomas is the anomaly: a pale, walking field of carbonate sand fed by a now-broken supply line.

Where the sand really comes from

The most repeated claim about Maspalomas — that the sand blew across from the Sahara, roughly 100 kilometres of open Atlantic to the east — is wrong, and the geology says so plainly. The grains are biogenic carbonate: the comminuted skeletons of marine organisms, shell fragments, coral, calcareous algae, and foraminifera that accumulated on the continental shelf off southern Gran Canaria. During the last glaciation, sea level fell far enough to expose that shelf as dry land. Prevailing winds then mobilised the loose carbonate and drove it onshore at the mouth of the Barranco de Fataga, the ravine whose sediment load fed the system. The proof is in the sand itself: a Saharan source would be quartz-dominated silica; Maspalomas sand is calcium carbonate of marine origin, which is why it reads pale gold rather than the iron-stained tan of true desert dunes. Saharan dust does reach the Canaries on the calima wind, but it is fine atmospheric dust, not the coarse bedload that builds a 20-metre dune. The dune field is a marine deposit, blown ashore — an aeolianite in the making, not a stray finger of Africa.

A field that walks

These are live dunes, and the distinction matters ecologically. They are transverse and barchan-type forms in a genuine mobile system, not a fixed sand pile that visitors happen to climb. The trade winds out of the east-northeast push the crests westward across the reserve at roughly two to five metres a year. An individual dune builds, oversteepens on its sheltered lee face, avalanches forward as a slip-face collapse, and reassembles downwind; the largest crests reach 15 to 20 metres before they slump. Walk a transect a year apart and the topography has rearranged. This mobility is the engine of the whole reserve. It buries and exposes seed banks, resets the substrate that pioneer plants colonise, and keeps the system from stabilising into scrub. Vegetation here is sparse and specialised — salt-tolerant, sand-burial-tolerant pioneers such as Traganum moquinii (the balancón) on the active front, and species like Launaea arborescens and Heliotropium ramosissimum on more fixed ground. A dune field that stops moving is not a healthier dune field; it is a dying one.

La Charca and the flyway

At the western edge, where the Barranco de Fataga meets the sea, sits La Charca: a shallow brackish lagoon fringed with tamarisk and reed, bordered by a grove of the endemic Canary Island date palm, Phoenix canariensis. This is the wet counterweight to the dry dune field, and it is the reason ornithologists come. The lagoon is a refuelling stop on the East Atlantic flyway, the migratory corridor running between Europe and Africa, and the only substantial coastal wetland on this stretch of the island. Observation records for the reserve list on the order of two dozen bird species using the water and its margins. Among the regulars: little egret (Egretta garzetta), grey heron (Ardea cinerea), Eurasian whimbrel (Numenius phaeopus), common greenshank (Tringa nebularia), Eurasian spoonbill (Platalea leucorodia), black-winged stilt (Himantopus himantopus), and resident common moorhen (Gallinula chloropus). The lagoon's brackish chemistry — neither fresh nor fully marine — is what makes it productive for waders, and it is sensitive to exactly the freshwater inputs and groundwater levels that surrounding development has altered. The palm grove is not decorative either: Phoenix canariensis is the archipelago's signature endemic tree, and El Palmeral is one of the few coastal stands left.

The threats, named honestly

Maspalomas is shrinking, and the causes are documented and largely man-made. The dune system historically ran on a sediment loop: sand eroded off Playa del Inglés to the east, blew up and over the field, returned to the sea at the Maspalomas point, and was carried partway back by longshore currents to restart the cycle. Two things severed it. First, the wall of hotels built along the rear of the dunes from the 1960s onward disrupted the wind field that delivered sand into the system. Second, hard coastal structures interrupted the longshore supply. A 2007 study in the Journal of Coastal Research, working from aerial photographs, foraminiferal content, and sediment-transport analysis, documented a real sediment deficit and estimated that on the order of 45,000 cubic metres of sand leave the field for the sea bed each year without replacement. On top of the sediment starvation comes direct trampling. A 2022 study in the Journal of Environmental Management, led by coastal geomorphologist Patrick Hesp with researchers from the Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and Flinders University, mapped 298 sites of cruising sexual activity across the vegetated dunes and tied them to damage to 10 plant species — three of them endemic — through trampling, uprooting to build screened hollows, and 18 categories of litter. The paper recorded endemic Gran Canaria giant lizards, Gallotia stehlini, dying after ingesting discarded condoms. Since 22 May 2020, visitors must keep to roughly 8 kilometres of marked trails, with off-trail fines starting at 150 euros, precisely because off-trail traffic across a starved field accelerates the loss.

Putting the sand back by lorry

The management response treats the field like a patient on supplementary feeding. The Cabildo de Gran Canaria's MASDUNAS project, a pilot of roughly two years with a budget of about 1,155,000 euros, set out to slow the bleeding. It installed 78 experimental sand-capture devices to trap grains before they blew off the system, planted 350 balancón (Traganum moquinii) shrubs as living sand-fixing elements on the degraded front, and in October 2018 ran an experimental sand transfer designed to move up to 60,000 cubic metres back into the field. A follow-on phase, MASDUNAS II, reported protecting some 14,000 cubic metres of sand and restoring around 85 percent of the most degraded, most exposed dune frontage. The honest summary is uncomfortable: authorities now physically truck sand from the shore back to the rear of the dunes, doing by lorry what the wind once did for free. It is the world's first such intervention on an arid carbonate dune system, and whether it can outrun the 45,000-cubic-metre annual deficit under continued tourist pressure and climate change is an open question, not a settled victory.

Back to the full Maspalomas Dunes guide.