Lanzarote and the legacy of César Manrique

Coming into land in Lanzarote on a late-December morning, the pilot gave the ground temperature as a balmy 21C. No wonder the Canary island has become a hugely popular winter-break destination for sun-starved northern Europeans. But an official sign on the wall in baggage reclaim urging visitors to save water, leave the landscape untouched, and buy local handicrafts as souvenirs, suggested an interest in conservation perhaps surprising in a busy tourist island.

If Lanzarote has achieved a certain balance between development and ecology it’s largely thanks to César Manrique (1919-1992). Manrique was an artist, architect, environmental and political activist whose impassioned defence of what he called the “singularity” of the island has given him the status of a local legend. Twenty-five years after his death in a traffic accident, his legacy is chiefly visible in his interventions in the lanzaroteño landscape; in his designs for public art and street furniture; and in the various houses in which he lived and worked. All of which come together into a cultural trail offering insights into the fecund relationship between a charismatic Canarian creator and his barren, bleak, but often surreally beautiful homeland.

The trail might begin at the Meliá Salinas, probably Lanzarote’s best hotel and a pleasing example of mid-century modern Spanish public architecture. Designed in 1973 in Rationalist style by Fernando Higueras, whose work is now much admired in Spain, the building’s curving, jutting forms in white-painted concrete were complemented by his friend Manrique’s addition of lush gardens, quirkily landscaped pool areas, and on-site artworks.

I couldn’t remember a beach hotel anywhere with the Salinas’ idiosyncratic, not to say eccentric, personality. It stood among the tourist developments of Costa Teguise — one of Lanzarote’s three main resorts, itself a reminder of Manrique’s early insistence that new building on the island should be discreet, respectful and low-rise.

The hotel was laid out around well-like patios filled with an artificial jungle of stately palms, ferns and succulents, white-painted pathways meandering among streams and lumps of black volcanic rock — typical expressions, as I would soon discover, of Manrique’s art-in-nature philosophy. Two of his rather murky abstract paintings hung behind the reception desk. What impressed me more were his original wall-pieces in the lobby and cocktail lounge — parades of stylised creatures carved into long panels of island stone. My appetite whetted, I set out for the Fundación César Manrique in Tahíche, where in 1968 the artist built a house for himself amid the char-black, encrusted, strangely liquid forms of a lava field. The house lay just beyond the roundabout, now popularly known as Rotonda Manrique, where on September 25 1992 he jumped the Stop sign, collided with a 4x4 and met his untimely death.

At first sight the building appeared to be a plain, white, flat-roofed lanzaroteño country house. Inside, on the ground floor, dazzling African light flooded in through skylights, pointing up the work of Canarian artists such as Manolo Millares, Pepe Dámaso and Oscar Domínguez and their peninsular contemporaries Eduardo Chillida, Antoni Tàpies and Pablo Picasso. Among the drawings and memorabilia I was pleased to see a sketch for what would become the stone wall-pieces at the Hotel Salinas. Below ground level, however, was where the fun began. In Manrique’s hands three subterranean volcanic “bubbles” had become chill-out spaces with his trademark bright-white paths, water falling into jewel-like turquoise pools, giant cacti, and niches for sitting, all arranged in a curvy hippy style with hints of Ibiza and Morocco.

At the Fundación I learnt more about Manrique’s sojourns in Madrid and New York and his subsequent return to Lanzarote just at the point (1966) when a gruellingly poor, waterless island with few natural resources was beginning to morph into a thriving tourist economy. With the crucial support of Lanzarote’s then-President José Ramírez Cerdá, a childhood friend, Manrique began documenting the island’s traditional culture and ecology, working tirelessly for the protection of both. His big idea was the network of eight Centres of Art, Culture and Tourism (CACTs) including a cactus garden in a former open cast mine, a viewing point burrowed out of a clifftop, his own house/museum in Tahíche, and the magical Jameos del Agua. (A ninth CACT, an underwater museum created by English sculptor Jason deCaires Taylor, was recently added to the group.)

As the days went by I began to see his fingerprint in unlikely places, from the waste paper bins in rust-red cast iron strategically placed at popular beauty spots (a Manrique design) and the childlike colours and shapes adorning the island’s largest car-hire fleet (ditto) to the 17th-century granary in colonial Teguise, transformed by the great man into Spain’s most unusual bank branch. One morning in Arrecife I sat down to a café con leche and saw that my sugar sachet bore a naïf drawing of an aboriginal devil waving a trident: pure César.

Towards the north, in the island’s wild and rocky uplands, I found more evidence of his peculiar genius. At the Mirador del Río, a lookout point wedged into the cliff face of the mighty Risco de Famara, the huge views of neighbouring island La Graciosa and the Atlantic Ocean 475m below were framed by a round-edged window like that of a 1960s spaceship, Manrique’s all-white hippy shtick here seeming to stray into Barbarella territory. In Timanfaya National Park — an expanse of volcanic desert with no less than 25 craters — the dining room of Manrique’s circular Restaurante del Diablo overlooked a moonscape of turbulent, crusted magma with painterly overtones of purple, orange, white and reddish-pink.

But the high point of Manrique’s landscape art is, perhaps, the famous Jameos del Agua. This natural monument, a volcanic tube or tunnel with a mysterious lagoon in its depths, is also a curious leisure-dome with terraces among the rock face, plants hanging in cages, a restaurant with the original Manrique-designed furniture, a natural auditorium sloping down into the earth, and deep, slow ambient music on the PA. The odd thing was that none of these creative tweaks seemed extraneous, but were flattering enhancements to the spirit of the place.

I drove back to Costa Teguise along avenues lined with cheap perfume shops, car-hire offices, glitzy “show bars” and British restaurants. The mass-tourist side of Lanzarote, though thankfully low-key, is undistinguished, and Manrique would surely have railed against its disregard for the island’s “singularity”. Looming on the hillside above the resort, too, I couldn’t help noticing the ziggurat-like form of a big new hotel that, although it might not look out of place in Torremolinos, surely contravened local rules on building height.

Manrique’s artistic legacy is permanent, but the intangible imprint of his activism, less so. A quarter-century after his death there are signs that the conservationist zeal he inspired in his fellow islanders may be fading along with his memory. Earlier this year the Fundación César Manrique announced a campaign against the proliferation of giant billboards on the island (these having been banned, in theory, under a 1991 planning law). “For some people here, unfortunately, the figure of Manrique is a still an uncomfortable memory,” says Alfredo Diaz of the Fundación. “They think, ‘he was the guy who stopped me building the apartment block I wanted to’.”

In the inland village of Haria, where the artist took up residence during the last four years of his life, I took my leave. The mature Manrique I found in a solid village house with wooden beams and clay floors was less the bohemian rebel child and more the well-regarded artist who enjoyed his creature comforts. The library held books on Picasso, Carl Sagan (and a number on UFOs). There was eclectic furniture and a grand piano, folk masks and objects collected on his journeys overseas. A table in the kitchen was laid for one. In his studio at the end of the garden, preserved intact since 1992, a video showed a wiry, handsome 70-year-old, hard at work in spattered blue overalls, flinging paint at a canvas on the floor with Pollock-esque abandon, before meeting the camera’s gaze with eyes as dark as lava.

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