Covid, one year on: Stuck in Fuerteventura

A view from one of the hotel pools. Initially, there were sunbeds below those umbrellas, but they soon disappeared.

A year ago today, we set off on holiday. Nothing unusual about that - it's become a privileged habit in recent years for us to go on holiday in February/March, an ideal time of year for escaping the doom and gloom of the British winter while also dodging the higher travel prices of school holidays. Two years ago, we went to Jamaica, and three years ago our destination was Cuba, but this time, we settled for the short-haul destination of Fuerteventura - which turned out to be a wise choice, all things considered.

This holiday was to be a memorable one, for all the wrong reasons.

On 10 March 2020, Covid-19 was lurking in the background. There had been a few cases in the UK, but nothing too alarming - certainly nothing to give any indication of the sheer magnitude of chaos it was poised to unleash. A month previously, a hotel in Tenerife had hit UK headlines when it was put into lockdown due to a Covid outbreak, but other than that, reports of Covid in Europe were few and far between, with the press still focusing on the situation in China.

Arriving at Gatwick early that Tuesday morning, bleary-eyed from the early hour, and wrapped up in the nervous anticipation that comes with travelling, we checked into our flight with nothing amiss. It was only once we'd cleared security and bagged a table for an airside breakfast at Jamie's Italian that a glance at the departures board revealed that all flights for Italy - and only Italy - were disrupted. Unusually, the flights weren't declared as 'cancelled'. Instead, passengers for those flights were directed to the Information desk. At this point, we assumed that the issue was Covid related, perhaps that Italy had closed its borders to all but Italian residents. Our assumptions were proven correct in the coming days when Italy was faced with the biggest Covid outbreak seen in Europe to date.

We intended to return to Corralejo. We never got a chance.

Aside from a broken tooth incident (not mine) on the plane, our journey to Fuerteventura went uninterrupted, and our holiday got underway. Our hotel, the Riu Oliva Beach Resort, was split into two parts - the main hotel building, and a series of motel-style rooms on walkways in the gardens opposite. We were in the latter, and despite our initial frustration at trying to find our room in the sweltering heat, suitcases in tow, the isolated location of our room turned out to be both a blessing and a worry.

The following day, our first full day on holiday, was spent tracking down a dentist in the town of Corralejo to deal with the broken tooth. Emergency dentistry compete, we took the opportunity to reacquaint ourselves with the town, which we had visited eight years previously, and spent the morning recognising shops and cafes, admiring the new additions and planning what we'd visit when we returned to the town centre in a couple of days time for the market - and which ferry we'd catch over to Lanzarote for a day trip the following week. How naïve we were.

The next couple of days passed in a blur of beach days, pool dips, and evening cocktails. Gradually though, things began to change. Posters in the hotel lobby advertising a local festival the following week had 'cancelled' stickers plastered over them. Word went around among the hotel guests that the town market we'd been planning to visit on Friday was cancelled. Guests were checking out, but nobody seemed to be checking in to replace them. Covid was coming, but we still had no idea of the magnitude. 

'Soon there will be more goats than people', we joked, until suddenly, it wasn't so funny.

As a rule, I don't use the internet on holiday - my job revolves around the internet and social media, and emails, so I like to switch off when I'm away. The same with TV - I rarely watch it on holiday. However, this time we were tuning into the BBC World News channel in our hotel room every evening, mainly out of curiosity as to how the Covid situation was shaping up elsewhere, rather than any real concern that it might affect us on our little island in the Atlantic.

On Saturday 14 March, everything changed. Laying on a sunbed by the pool, half dozing, half earwigging on other guests' conversations, we heard the alarming news that holiday companies had cancelled all flights into and holidays in the Canary Islands with immediate effect, and some were evacuating tourists immediately. I ran back to our room to grab my phone and see the news - and from that point onwards, I was glued to the screen, refreshing news live feeds, for the entire holiday. It was true, flights in were cancelled, with planes being sent over empty from the UK to get people out, and Spain was heading towards a lockdown.

We returned from lunch one day to find the pool taped off.

The next day, Sunday, signs went up around the hotel that the majority of the restaurants and bars were closing, with all guests directed to the one remaining dining room for all meals. After a morning by the pool, we went to lunch, and returned to find the pool taped off, all sunbeds stacked up, leaving a deck area which had been lively two hours previously completely barren. For me, that was when the seriousness of the situation hit. The hotel - and the island - was literally closing down around us. The gate out of the hotel to the beach was locked, as Spain declared its beaches closed. Lifeguard shacks were boarded up, beach flags removed unceremoniously from their flagpoles. The sea and the pools glistened temptingly, so close to us, but completely out of bounds.

With little else to do, and no further information, we returned to our hotel room for the afternoon. By now, it was clear that our holiday was over, but we still had six days until our flight home, the following Saturday. 

The next morning, TUI called a meeting for its guests at the hotel. Pack your cases and be ready to leave at any moment, we were told. TUI was getting customers off the island as quickly as possible, and we could be called up for an available flight at any time. At the very latest, we would be leaving by Saturday 21 March, our original departure date, as all Spanish hotels had to close down by law on that day.

Cats joined the goats in taking over the hotel.

We had only heard about this meeting from talking to other guests, and when we asked the TUI rep, he was offensively dismissive about our concerns that the message hadn't reached us, and did nothing to quell our fears that news about an earlier flight might also fail to reach us. A year on, this is what makes me most angry about the whole situation - I won't go into too much detail, lest this descends into a rant, but a tiny improvement in communication on TUI's part would have gone a long way to relieving a lot of worry for a lot of people.

We had no idea what was going on elsewhere in Spain or even on the island, other than TV news clips which showed Spanish armed police patrolling streets in Madrid and Barcelona. Our hotel was out in the remote sand dunes, a distance from the town centre - ironically, a location we had admired on our previous trip. The main news from back home was a wave of panic buying, and a shortage of food in British supermarkets. As is normal when going on holiday, we'd left our fridge fairly empty, planning to stock it up on our return. The possibility of returning to empty supermarket shelves and no way of obtaining food became a worry at the back of our minds, but it was a secondary worry in comparison to the main one confronting us - when (and if) we were going to get back home. 

The beach, before it was closed down completely.

It seems crazy to say this now, given the events of the past year and the criticism the UK government had received for its slow actions, but we spent that week worrying that the UK borders would close before we could make it home. With little else to do, and nothing else occupying our minds, we spent each day flicking between English-speaking news channels and watched as one by one, countries closed their borders. Italy, Australia, New Zealand - some weren't even allowing residents to fly back to their homelands. Elsewhere, cruise ships became stranded with thousands of passengers aboard. Between the fear of the borders closing before we could get back, and the fear of missing a message about a new flight, I barely slept for days.

Fewer and fewer guests appeared at hotel mealtimes every day until only the British were left - German, Swedish and French voices slowly disappeared. It was at this point that we became grateful that our room was over the other side of the complex - the five-minute walk between there and the main hotel building for meals was our only experience of the outside world. Guests staying in the main hotel building didn't even have that, just a short ride in the lift down from their room to the restaurant, and back again.

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Day by day, the hotel's resident heard of semi-wild goats quickly went from source of light entertainment to something more sinister - a symbol of humans being run out of the hotel. Our early jokes that there would soon by more goats than people became less amusing by the day, as we sat in our room hearing suitcases being wheeled along the corridor outside, the sound of our fellow guests checking out and flying for the safety of their home countries. Being out on our own, on the other side of the hotel, the only remaining occupied room in the vicinity, it became very isolated, which heightened our fear of being forgotten about/abandoned by Tui. They could have shut the hotel down completely, every member of staff abandoning their posts, and we wouldn't know anything about it until we next walked over to the main building for a meal.

One day, the only human we saw over our side of the complex was our room cleaner. In my broken Spanish, I ascertained that as of that Saturday, she was losing her job after more than 20 years of working at the hotel, not knowing when or even if she'd be back. Despite the sadness of the situation and the sympathy I felt for her, I still wasn't visualising the situation as something that would last for more than a few weeks, maximum two months. A year on, I wonder what happened to her. Has she got her job back? Has the hotel even reopened since we were among the last guests to check out 12 months ago?

To be continued.