Playa de la Barca, Fuerteventura Live Cam

Playa de la Barca is part of Sotavento, the long beach along the south-east side of Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands. The camera looks over the shallows where the lagoon forms.

A sandbar runs parallel to the shore here, and the tide fills the space behind it and empties it again: at high water there is a lagoon a metre deep and a kilometre long, and at low water a flat of wet sand.

That combination of flat water and steady trade wind has brought a world championship windsurfing event here every summer since the 1980s. The Jandía peninsula behind the beach is a protected run of dunes and volcanic ridges, and Fuerteventura is the oldest island in the archipelago.