Lanzarote

Biosphere Reserve - UNESCO

The island was named after a Genoese navigator called Lancelotto Malocello who arrived on the island during the second half of the XIV century opening the way to successive expeditions of French, British and Spanish sailors and merchants. Previously the isles were known as the Fortunate Islands.

Fishing and agriculture once formed the basis of the island’s economy but have since been overtaken by the excellent quality of its tourism industry.

In 1987 Lanzarote was declared one of the six universal models of sustainable development by the World Tourism Organization and in 1994 it was declared a Reserve of the Biosphere by UNESCO.

The island enjoys an average temperature of 22ºC all year-round due to its advantageous location in the Tropic of Cancer
Lanzarote is the most easterly of the seven major Canary Islands and lies in the Atlantic Ocean only some 100 km (60 miles) from the coast of Africa and 1,000 km from the Iberian Peninsula.

Lanzarote, including the small islands of La Graciosa, Alegranza, Montaña Clara, Roque del Este y del Oeste, covers 900 km² running 60 km north to south and only 20 km at its widest point.
Lanzarote is made up of seven municipalities: Arrecife (the capital), Teguise, Haría, San Bartolomé, Tías, Tinajo and Yaiza, with an official population of nearly 100,000 inhabitants, mostly residing in the south-central part of the island.

Arrecife is the political and commercial capital and home to half of the island’s population. Five minutes away is the international airport with its daily flights to the other Canary Islands as well as to mainland Spain and continental Europe.

Lanzarote and Cesar Manrique

The island in its present form is unthinkable without César Manrique. His influence and work have left their mark on the island. Manrique was a painter, sculptor, architect, ecologist, curator of monuments, town planner and landscape gardener. César Manrique was the most outstanding artistic personality in the whole of the Canarian Archipelago.
This unconventional man was born in 1919 in Arrecife. In 1945 after the Spanish Civil War he moved to Madrid where he began to study Fine Art with a scholarship, graduating in 1950. In 1953 he began to paint abstract compositions (a virtual revolt in General Franco’s Spain) and exhibited a year later. By the end of the 1950’s he had made a name for himself in Madrid and exhibitions followed in capitals of Europe, Japan and the USA which led to his international repute.

In 1965 he moved to New York where he had been offered a post at the International Institute for Art Education. Suddenly César Manrique was hanging alongside Joan Miró and Max Beckmann. In 1968 Manrique travelled to Lanzarote as a had a feeling that the island needed him. He made himself its advocate. The fact that Manriques ideas were realised owes much to his relentless energy, persistence and expertise. He propagated a form of elite tourism to help the poverty stricken island where the population was supposed to be evacuated 50 years before.

Manrique shaped architectural policy on the island, persuading authorities to ban advertisement hoardings and to run telephone and power lines underground, he also fiercely controlled the building development and the only skyscraper to be built (Grand Hotel in Arrecife) was described by him as ‘a crime against the spirit of the island’. His aim was to build in accordance with nature and help extend natural forms. He also made the architecture more uniform with whitewashed walls, doors and windows painted in green or blue and the reoccurring uniform cubic architectural style. Unfortunately with the development of tourism market forces became the decisive factor behind new constructions and ‘stupid, brutal speculators’ as he described him no longer heeded his advice. He died at the age of 73 in an accident in 1992.