What you can see on the Valdevaqueros webcam
One wide-angle camera shows the bay live from the water's edge to the dune, so you can tell at a glance whether the water is empty or crowded with kites. Beside it sits a 24-hour time-lapse of the same view, which tells the story of the day: when the wind got up, when the sails went out and when the beach emptied again.
Valdevaqueros live from the Spin Out centre
Tarifa Spin Out, a windsurf and wing-foil centre founded on Valdevaqueros beach in 1988, streams this fisheye camera from above its beach terrace. The wide lens takes in the whole bay: the centre's red flag and sign in the foreground, its palms and shaded terrace on the right, the sand curving away from left to right and the pale dune of Punta Paloma on the hillside at the end of the beach. A huge sky fills the top half of the picture, so it shows the clouds as well as the sea. On a windy afternoon the water fills with sails and kites; on a calm morning the bay is still and the beach almost empty. This is the live original of the Valdevaqueros camera that Windy also carries.
The dune at Punta Paloma
The dune is younger than it looks. In the 1940s the army, trying to stop drifting sand from burying its posts on this coast, reshaped the ground that led to them and dug a long trench parallel to the shore; with the strong levante behind it, the sand piled up higher and higher. Part of the dune was later held in place with pine plantations, but the bare slope is still growing: it stands tens of metres high, and on days of strong levante it spills over the road. Behind the beach, streams wind down through low river meadows to the sand, and the whole bay lies inside the Strait Natural Park (Parque Natural del Estrecho), declared in 2003, where the marshy ground behind Valdevaqueros and Los Lances is important for birds.
Why the kites come to Valdevaqueros
The Cádiz provincial tourist board puts it down to three things, the levante, the shelter of the bay and the way the beach faces, which together have made Valdevaqueros one of the capitals of kitesurfing. Kite, windsurf and paddleboard schools work from the sand alongside a handful of beach bars, and yet the bay remains one of the least built-up corners of the Cádiz coast. Plans for a large resort beside the dune were taken to court, and the Supreme Court ruled against building there in 2020.
When to watch Valdevaqueros
Spain is one hour ahead of the UK and Ireland. The camera faces south-west along the bay towards Punta Paloma, so in the morning the light falls from behind it and the colours of the water and the dune are at their clearest; late in the day it looks into the sun. If you only check in the evening, the time-lapse lets you scroll back and see what the wind did while you were at work.
Getting to Valdevaqueros
The beach is about 6 miles (10 km) from Tarifa along the N-340 towards Cádiz, and several tracks lead off the road down to the sand. Closer to town, the Tarifa webcam watches Los Lances, the long beach that runs from the town towards Valdevaqueros, looking out over the Strait towards Morocco.
