Fuerteventura's tarmac stops short of its own southern tip. Past Morro Jable the graded road turns to volcanic gravel, and the final stretch to Punta de Jandía belongs to vehicles with clearance and a roll cage. This is the terrain that gave rise to the Excursion Buggy Costa Calma tours running out of the resort's commercial centre. The peninsula those tracks cross was once an island in its own right, welded to the rest of Fuerteventura by a low isthmus of wind-driven sand — the same sand that now forms Costa Calma's beaches. That isthmus once carried a border. A dry-stone wall, the Muro de Jandía, ran across it from the fifteenth century, dividing the aboriginal territories of Maxorata and Jandía; sections of its footings survive in the gravel. Behind them rises the Jandía massif, protected since 1987 as a natural park of roughly 14,300 hectares and crowned by Pico de la Zarza at 807 metres, the highest ground on the island. Fuerteventura entered the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve network in 2009, and this peninsula holds its rarest endemics, among them Euphorbia handiensis, the cactus-like Jandía spurge found nowhere else on earth. Human traces along the barranco tracks are sparse and specific. El Puertito de la Cruz remains a hamlet of a few dozen low houses above a shingle cove. A lighthouse has marked the south-western point since the 1860s. On the windward side, Cofete's twelve-kilometre beach lies beneath the ridge, overlooked by the Villa Winter, a 1940s house whose purpose is still argued over. Guided Fuerteventura buggy safaris follow the same gravel and riverbed lines that goatherds and fishermen used for centuries, which is why the routes converge rather than compete. Today the appeal is access rather than speed. A modern side-by-side — Can-Am machines dominate the local fleet — carries two people over washboard gravel, dune skirts and dry barrancos that a hire car's insurance forbids outright. Operators run in convoy with a lead guide and a sweep vehicle, keeping groups on marked tracks inside the protected area rather than cutting new scars into the scrub. Departing from the resort strip, an Excursion Buggy Costa Calma tour, known locally as an excursión en buggy, reaches ground that most visitors to the island never see from the coast road.