Timanfaya volcano, César Manrique's earth-art, and wine grown in volcanic black basalt craters
Lanzarote is the most dramatically volcanic of the Canary Islands — still visibly raw from the 1730–36 eruptions that buried a quarter of the island under lava and gave birth to the extraordinary Timanfaya National Park, where geothermal heat is so close to the surface that a handful of dry grass dropped into a crack in the ground bursts into flames. Artist-architect César Manrique (born here in 1919) spent his life weaving human structures into the volcanic landscape without disturbing it: his homes, restaurants, cactus garden, and art installations are built into lava tubes, lava fields, an…
Lanzarote's transformation began on 1 September 1730, when a fissure opened at Timanfaya and began an eruption lasting six continuous years — one of the longest in recorded history. When it ended, a third of the island's farmland was buried and a quarter of its population had emigrated to Cuba and South America. The new lava fields proved paradoxically fertile once the 18th-century farmers learned to dig through them to the moist volcanic ash beneath and cultivate vines in hollowed pits (the enarenado technique); the island recovered economically. César Manrique's 1966 return from New York (w…