An island apart – the eco-tourism pioneer of Lanzarote

There’s nothing very new about eco-tourism, other than the name. The Canarian island of Lanzarote has been living by its code since the local artist and architect, César Manrique, found common cause with the tourism authorities and helped put the brakes on the kind of development that would threaten to overwhelm other islands, like Mallorca…

 

“Yes, it’s sheer hell,” I told anyone who cared to listen, after we found ourselves “stuck” on Lanzarote after New Year in an Anglo-Spanish COVID restrictions pincer movement, which made returning to the UK an uncertain goal at best.

It was only a combination of rising numbers of COVID cases on the island, largely fuelled by zero restrictions on travel to and from metropolitan Spain, and the sinister threat of possible hotel-based quarantine on returning to the UK, that eventually stirred us to buy tickets for a rare flight Home seven and half weeks after we’d first set foot on Lanzarote.

Those extra weeks enabled us to get to know even better an island that we’d previously visited several times and on which we have found ourselves increasingly at home. We even found time for a bit of fantasy house-hunting – a pursuit made less realistic by the final grim reality of Brexit.

Lanzarote may not be everyone’s cup of tea – much of the island bears the still raw scars of the most recent volcanic eruptions: a legacy of contorted lava flows and bare red scree. But its appeal lies not so much in what it has, as in what it has not. You can count on the fingers of half a hand the number of high-rise hotels or other intrusive tourism developments.

Instead, houses are low, simple whitewashed affairs, green-shuttered if inland and blue-shuttered if by the sea. Slightly taller hotels are restricted to the three main resorts of Costa Teguise, Playa del Carmen and Playa Blanca.

Architecture often mimics more closely the distinctive Manrique style, a style developed by the artist when in New York in the company of the likes of Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock. The former in particular may have encouraged Manrique’s archetypal curved structures and the sharp contrast between immaculate whitewashed walls and the harsh black of the frothy lava stone facings plucked from the very landscape itself.

On his return from America, Manrique threw himself into realising a plan for the island’s tourism that would link development irrevocably with landscape and heritage. But his ideas can be traced back to 1959 when he first cooperated with his friend, José Ramírez, the mayor of the capital, Arrecife, on a plan for the municipal park.

The guiding principle of Manrique’s ideas is the closeness of the relationship between land and custom on the one hand and relatively low-key sustainable tourist attractions on the other.

OK, so you can still do “mass tourism” if you want on Lanzarote, and just stay by the pool at your coastal resort. But even this type of visitor is likely to take an organised tour to some of Manrique’s most celebrated contributions to the tourist economy.

Chief among these is El Diablo restaurant at Montañas del Fuego, or mountains of fire. It sits atop the still smouldering central volcano of the Timanfaya National Park, affording a panoramic vista of lava fields, cones and craters.

Other attractions are even more closely integrated to the volcanic landscape: Jameos del Agua features limpid pools and a concert hall integrated into lava tunnels; the Cueva de los Verdes, nearby, offers an underground experience to which the Manrique touches are no more than subtle reminders of the artist’s influence.

I hadn’t been to this enormous cave system on previous visits and nor had either of us seen LaGomar, the house conceived by Manriqué and designed by the artist Jesús Soto for the British developer Sam Benady.

When the actor Omar Sharif was in Lanzarote filming The Mysterious Island, he fell in love with this house, hewn from the walls of a quarry in the centre of the island, with distant views towards the old capital of Teguise, the mountains and the ocean.

Having bought it on impulse, the story goes that the actor then lost it in a poker game with Benady. The restaurant by the pool beneath the house changed hands quite recently and was just reopening after a torrid COVID winter: it promised and delivered fine dining at an affordable price, followed by drinks in a cave bar high in the quarry face.

You could spend a week just visiting Manriqué treasures and we still have some to see, but his cactus garden and Mirador del Rio – a clifftop viewing chamber overlooking the island of La Graciosa – are must-sees, as are the various homes he occupied at different times of his life. These are mostly maintained by the foundation set up in his name after his untimely death in a car crash in 1992.

Our extended stay was marked by occasional bouts of rain that executed a certain magic on the arid semi-desert landscape, which gradually began to turn green before our eyes. Relatively little of the island is cultivated these days and we learned that the economics no longer stack up so well as the low-paid crop-pickers can earn more working in the resorts. Perhaps a more welcoming approach towards migrants arriving in small boats from Morocco could offer a more sustainable agricultural solution?

But sweet, little Canarian potatoes are ubiquitous on the menu and there are some gems to be found among the numerous family-owned wineries or bodegas. Traditionally, the grapes are grown on black volcanic soil in semi-circular walled pits that protect them from the prevailing trade winds (see main picture).

By various means we made exciting new discoveries: the numerous restaurants in the fishing village of Playa Quemada, which we first spotted from the plane window; the coastal village of Punta Mujeres, which a French market stall holder at Teguise told us about; the sleepy hill villages in the north of the island.

Punta Mujeres, in the north of the island, became our home for a month, with its dozen or so natural swimming pools and its little tapas bars and, just a few miles north, we found untouched sandy bays.

Taking a week on Fuerteventura we saw for ourselves the price paid for not following the Manriqué model: a huge hotel built – corruptly, it is said – in the middle of protected Parque Natural coastal duneland; the utterly superfluous motorway constructed with EU support, but which ends in the middle of the desert.

Previously we had made no more than a day trip to this neighbouring island and our longer stay confirmed for us the value of Manriqué’s contribution to the very look and feel of Lanzarote. It had been my intention to begin delivering creative writing courses at an eco-resort run by a British family on Lanzarote. Placed on hold during the pandemic, I now dare to think in terms of starting this venture again, with the focus very much on the land and its people. Watch out for further updates on the Training pages of this website.

Manriqué’s influence endures everywhere, and we enjoyed an exhibition of contemporary art in Arrecife, where you could detect his fingerprint on all the works. I did, however, make the uncomfortable discovery that Manrique had fought on Franco’s side during the Civil War. To that observations I should add, however, that his experience so affected him that he went on to decry all war in absolute terms.

 

Sea swimming pool at Punta Mujeres, left