César Manrique (1919-1992)

Few people are as deeply linked to the development of an entire region as the Spanish artist César Manrique is to the Canary Island of Lanzarote. The impact of his philosophy of respect for the landscape and taking inspiration from local values, as well as his architecture, are still locally relevant today, almost three decades after the car accident that took his life in 1992. However, Manrique was largely unnoticed outside the Canary Islands until recently, when he began to be appreciated as an inspiration for sustainable architectural and urban development, within an economy of means and respect for environmental values.

Lanzarote is characterised by a mild climate and intense trade winds throughout the year. Its distinctive dark red landscape is the result of historic volcanic eruptions, as attested by the nearly one hundred volcanoes present on its surface. The island’s landscapes and geology have been described as ‘Mars on Earth’, and been used by the European Space Agency as a training ground for future extraterrestrial missions. However, its remarkable geological make-up means Lanzarote is of little agricultural value, leading some authorities in the past to even suggest a de-occupation.

Born on Lanzarote in 1919 into a middle-class family, from an early age Manrique showed a great artistic sensitivity. After the Civil War – a traumatic experience that would lead him to burn his uniform on his return home – and a few months as an architecture student at his father’s insistence, he moved to Madrid in 1945 to study fine arts. Manrique quickly made his reputation as an artist – though his work was not always appreciated by some colleagues who criticised its commercial nature. The unexpected death of his partner Pepi Gómez, in 1963, caused Manrique to change direction, accepting an invitation to move his studio to New York. But he soon became critical of an environment he considered inhuman, feeling an ‘imperious need to return to the land’. In 1966, at the age of 47 and having exhibited in 28 cities in 16 countries, the artist moved back to Lanzarote.

On his return, Manrique found an island which had hardly changed from the one he had left twenty years earlier: unpaved roads, a small airport with hardly any air traffic, just a hundred beds to satisfy tourist demand, and a shortage of drinking water that had to be imported by boat. Manrique understood that the island’s agricultural sterility hid an aesthetically fertile landscape. ‘Lanzarote was a unique island in the world’, he said, recalling how at the time, when he spoke about its beauty, ‘everyone laughed and didn’t understand me. Lanzarote was like a work of art without framing. I put it on, showing its real value’.  

Manrique’s initial intention was to create an artists’ colony on a piece of land in the interior of the island, which at that time had little economic value. This idea was partly inspired by the urban development that the architect Luis Barragán instigated in the 1940s on equally undervalued volcanic land in Pedregal, Mexico, which Manrique had visited. However, in Lanzarote’s case the original idea soon became a project
of development for the entire island.

To make this dream come true, Manrique understood that he had to drum up the support of the majority of the population. He extolled the beauty of the contrast between the dark volcanic landscape and the island’s traditional white buildings, the oceanic blue and the intense colours of the sparse vegetation – often protected by curved stone walls, creating unique landscapes. ‘At first, people were unaware’, Manrique explained. ‘Talking about the beauty of a stone was like speaking Chinese. Then, little by little, talking a lot because I was tireless, I convinced people and the authorities.’ The artist had the support of Pepín Ramírez, a childhood friend who had become the island’s president, and who provided him with the necessary means.

Manrique began to document construction on the island, as an ‘inventory and advice for all builders, architects and the people in general’. This analysis would become a book, Lanzarote, Unpublished Architecture, which aimed to ‘contribute to the salvation of the architectural harmony of Lanzarote’. At the same time, he began to make public presentations during village festivals, describing Lanzarote as the Cinderella of the Canary Islands, and contrasting images of local beauty with examples of unfortunate interventions on neighbouring islands. Manrique carried out this task altruistically, living off his commercial artistic practice; he believed that ‘every contemporary artist must apply his talent to life, to design, to the salvation of popular architecture, to the landscape’, since ‘the artist has a profound social mission, which is to apply his talent to the coexistence of human beings’. He insisted on the transformative power of beauty, convinced that ‘a child has to be educated in an environment full of beauty and harmony so that he can be a man for the future, full of fantasy and talent, with an ethical sense of life’.

In his eyes, the economic engine for the island’s development would be tourism. However, in contrast to the mass tourism that had taken hold since the 1950s on neighbouring islands and along much of the Spanish coast, Manrique proposed a sustainable alternative, focused on quality rather than quantity, bringing visitors who were sensitive to what he considered Lanzarote’s hidden values. ‘It is necessary to attract high-quality tourism, not of rich people but of human quality, because Lanzarote is an island for meditation, an enormously plastic island’, focusing on ‘a more spiritual tourism, including artists, poets and people prepared to understand the landscape of the island, which is like a great symphony that requires time to be understood’.

‘A motley collection of speculators appear like vultures, each day more numerous’ 

Change on a global scale was possible, Manrique believed, through the example of epicentres of development on the island that would serve as inspiration elsewhere. These interventions would concentrate on mostly degraded areas – such as derelict land, illegal dumps or disused buildings – acting as territorial acupuncture and affecting the rest of the island’s fabric. The first of these interventions was carried out on a series of connected jameos – collapsed volcanic tubes open to the air – in an advanced state of decay.  The project began in 1963 as a simple cleaning and conditioning work, but quickly developed into the art and tourism centre Los Jameos del Agua – an oasis hidden beneath the lava field, surrounded by other spaces gradually integrated into the project over a period of more than twenty years. He designed even small details such as signage, furniture, lighting and staff uniforms. This experience laid the foundations for a collaboration between Manrique, in charge of the artistic direction through in situ empirical design, and the local authorities, who would provide the material resources. 

Los Jameos del Agua was followed in 1968 by his own house in Tahiche, on a volcanic site where there were large, buried natural bubbles, which Manrique connected and transformed into a living space buried in the rock. Over these spaces he built a level of simple, white traditional volumes – in contrast to the dark volcanic stone – traversed by skylights that flood the underground galleries with light. The house engages with the volcanic landscape at different levels: views from the upper level across the terrain, the sea of lava outside that penetrates the artist’s studio through a large window, and the total immersion in lava on the lower level.

A few years later in 1973, the Mirador del Río was inaugurated, located on a cliff edge; Manrique created a buried route that leads to an unexpected panoramic view from the highest point of the island. The theatricality of the architectural journey – a sequence that preserves the mystery until a surprising visual ending – was characteristic of all his works. Manrique built prolifically on the island, including six centres of art, culture and tourism (the Jardín de Cactus was his last completed project, opened in 1991), the artist’s own house-museum, and various juguetes del viento (‘wind toys’) scattered across the island.

Manrique’s interventions had a direct impact on the tourism industry on the island and its economic growth. Just one of his works can attract nearly a million annual visitors, similar numbers to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. We could say that Lanzarote has witnessed its own Guggenheim effect, perhaps less famously, but no less effectively, with these figures achieved with an investment more than a hundred times lower than the Basque museum. Manrique was able to harmonise attractiveness and sustainability, within an economy of means, though it may seem ironic that works designed to promote an alternative to mass tourism receive such a high number of visitors (and, paradoxically, Manrique is also namechecked locally in numerous real-estate advertisements). 

Over time, Manrique’s discourse became more radical in the face of the aberrations that in his eyes were caused by ‘stupid speculative greed’, which would be capable of transforming the utopia of Lanzarote into a hell in order to make a short-term profit. ‘A motley collection of speculators appear like vultures, each day more numerous, reaching unsuspected limits of amorality with a nervous speculative hysteria’, Manrique lamented. Unhappy with the excess of visitors that Lanzarote and his own house attracted, he decided to move to the northern end of the island, declaring that he was thinking of leaving for good.

Today, Manrique has impacted the lives of hundreds of thousands of Lanzarote’s inhabitants, and is known to the more than fifty million people who have visited his works. Decades after his death, his legacy is still a reference point. ‘If Manrique was alive this would not have been possible’, can be found written on the hoardings around particularly obtrusive emerging buildings. His works arouse renewed interest among contemporary architects: Álvaro Siza underlines Manrique’s ability to ‘create essential relationships between arts, thinking and architecture’; Jacques Herzog emphasises his influence in Lanzarote on an urban scale; and Kengo Kuma highlights how ‘his works connected to the soil’. Frei Otto, on the other hand, defined Manrique as ‘a philosopher of architecture’, stating that ‘what he did was important for the whole world’; he hoped ‘that his spirit is kept alive. That there will be young and experienced architects who understand and follow his philosophy’. 

Shortly after Manrique’s death – and thanks to his direct involvement – Lanzarote received recognition from UNESCO for the balance between urban development and the environment. During his last days, Manrique insisted that ‘we live such a short space of time on this planet that each of our steps must be aimed at building more and more of the dream space of utopia. Let us build it together: it is the only way to make it possible’.