The architect who built an entire island
The pretty white-washed village of Haría in northern Lanzarote is as cool and leafy as a North African oasis, tucked quietly in the heart of the island’s “Valley of 1,000 Palms”. According to tradition, a new palm tree is planted each time a baby is born in the region. With its honeycomb of cupboard-sized craft shops, and pavements criss-crossed by papery palm fronds and littered with windfall dates, Lanzarote’s artiest village has a timeless charm all of its own.
But what has drawn me here today is not so much the village itself as the allure of its most famous former resident. I’m following in the footsteps of Lanzarote’s most loved and extraordinary son, the visionary 20th century artist, sculptor and architect César Manrique, whose centenary year is about to be celebrated. Among other tributes, the island’s airport (currently known as Arrecife, after Lanzarote’s capital) is due to be renamed César Manrique-Lanzarote Airport in his honour.
“Palm House” – here on the edge of Haría – is where Manrique lived and worked for the final four years of his life, until his death in a car accident at the age of 73. Sophisticated and comfortable, the house is preserved exactly as he left it on the morning of September 25 1992, the day of the fatal crash. The floor of his studio is scattered with unfinished canvasses. Tubes of paint rest in pigeon holes. Splattered blue overalls are draped over the back of a chair. The only intrusion into this time capsule is a video screen, where a grainy film is rolling. I hold my breath as a genial, handsome man dressed in those selfsame overalls raises his intelligent dark eyes to camera and smiles at me. I feel I’m standing at the feet of a giant.
Manrique’s influence on his native island is almost impossible to overestimate. In his own way – as a power for good – he’s proved as far-reaching a force in shaping present-day Lanzarote as the massive volcanic eruptions that blasted the island in the 1730s. That catastrophe left over a quarter of the landmass freakishly contorted and encrusted by lava.
So fractured a landscape might sound a wildly unpromising canvas for an artist. Timanfaya National Park, the blackened, tortured badlands covering the site of the eruptions, is as starkly surreal as an alien planet. (Apollo 17 astronauts were shown photographs of the carnage to prepare them for their moon landing.) But to Manrique, such desolation carried a haunting beauty of its own. He dedicated the last 25 years of his life to turning a natural disaster into an art form, conjuring vibrancy and glamour from the island’s ravaged surface like a master magician.
Manrique was born in Arrecife on April 24 1919. He moved to Madrid in 1945 to study art, and established himself as a successful metropolitan artist and sculptor. Yet his homeland’s primeval palette of colours remained unshakably etched in his imagination. His abstract paintings from that period swirl with the raw charcoals and crimsons of Lanzarote’s fire-blasted wildernesses.
Engaging and charismatic, he was famously fond of a good party. But a brief, hedonistic period in the mid-1960s as the toast of bohemian New York, collaborating with Andy Warhol and clinking cocktail glasses with Lower East Side’s avant-garde, very quickly lost its charms. “Man was not created for this artificiality,” he wrote to a friend. “There is an imperative need to go back to the soil. Feel it, smell it.”
Declaring himself rootless without “the pureness of my people... the bareness of my landscape”, Manrique returned to his native island in 1966, determined to channel his future creativity into showcasing its surreal splendour for the world. “Lanzarote is like an unframed, unmounted work of art,” he said many years later. “And I hung it and held it up for all to see.”
Lanzarote’s gallery of uniquely forged treasures couldn’t have found a more zealous curator. And – as luck would have it – the then-President of the Cabildo (island government) was one of Manrique’s oldest friends. Under their joint guidance, the island began mobilising sustainable tourism before the concept was even invented. Advertising hoardings were banned, telephone cables were laid underground, and mass tourism was confined to just three main coastal regions, with height restrictions imposed on hotels.
Manrique’s mantra was “Arte-Naturaleza, Naturaleza-Arte” (Art-Nature, Nature-Art): the belief that development should be environmentally-friendly and integrate man-made forms with natural spaces. His overall design aesthetic for the island’s sugar-cube housing was based on the same principle. Doors and shutters are painted forest-green inland, or marine-blue if sea-facing.
Fifty years after Manrique’s return to his homeland, these sugar-cube villages have become one of Lanzarote’s defining features, and his transforming imprint is everywhere on the island – right through to the quirky street furniture. (Not many places can have picnic wastepaper bins designed by someone whose paintings hung side-by-side with works by Picasso and Miró.) Pootling around on my home-spun “Hail César” trail (even the hire-car that I’m driving is emblazoned with a logo bearing his signature), I’ve been bowled over to see how much of his original planning blueprint still survives.
Yes, there’s obviously been some relaxation of building regulations on the coast. And I doubt that Manrique would have been over-fond of some of the waterfront’s more garish fast-food arcades and shopping malls. But the hotels of the three purpose-built tourist areas - Costa Teguise, Puerto del Carmen and Playa Blanca - also include some fabulously classy designer specials amidst their ice-white curves and coronets. Manrique himself landscaped the lush gardens and exotically-planted pool area of the island’s flagship Meliá hotel on Costa Teguise.
Elsewhere, the heart of the island still beats to the tune of its simpler, more rural past. Passing through the coal-black lava fields of the wine-growing region La Geria, I watch straw-hatted farmers with rakes cultivating individual vines behind semi-circular zocos (lava walls). On the roundabout by Monta?a Blanca village, I encounter one of Manrique’s own takes on perpetuating Lanzarote’s history – a playful Juguete del Viento (Wind Toy). Installed at various points across the island, these giant mobiles are his homage to the vanished windmills of his childhood. At the very centre of the island, I pull up beside his towering Lego-like sculpture Fecundidad (Fertility) - also known as El Monumente al Campesino (Monument to the Fieldworker). It’s made from the water tanks of old boats and is dedicated “to the nameless farmers whose hard work helped to create the island’s unique landscape”.
The jury still seems to be out on exactly what Fecundidad represents. A man and his dog, or a solitary camel, are the front runners - but it could just as easily be neither. The joy of Manrique’s work is that ordinary people love to engage with it. Fittingly, his most spectacular legacy to the island of his birth is a show-stopping series of public attractions created in harmony with the land.
Manrique preferred to call these constructions intervenciones (“interventions”). All are on sites imbued with a special spirit of place – his Mirador de Rio lookout, for instance, perches like an eagle’s nest on Lanzarote’s northern cape, with mesmerising views over the bird-sanctuary island of La Graciosa. And all include restaurants (Manrique loved dining out with friends), so that visitors can interact with their natural surroundings in a relaxed, social setting.
Jameos del Agua, which opened in the late 1960s as the first of Manrique’s “interventions”, is a breath-taking fantasy grotto by the northeast coast, built around a volcanic tunnel that collapsed to create a sequence of roofless, sunken caves (jameos). The complex includes an atmospheric garden-cave restaurant, with giant ferns suspended from the rock face in lobster pots, a magical underground lagoon where rare albino crabs flicker like stars, and a palm-fringed turquoise pool with a white concrete “beach”. There’s also a 600-seater concert hall. Hollywood legend Rita Hayworth called it “the Eighth Wonder of the World”.
Manrique’s personal favourite among his interventions was the quirky Jardín de Cactus in the small town of Guatizea, a 15-minute drive south from Jameos del Agua. Set in a former quarry, it’s planted with thousands of cacti arranged like exhibits in a Mad Hatter’s sculpture park. Taking a pit-stop before continuing on my travels, I’m amused to discover that the restaurant serves vegetarian cactus burgers in bright red buns (a nod to the cochineal beetles cultivated in local cactus fields). They taste better than they look.
Jardín de Cactus opened in 1991 and was to be the last of Manrique’s great projects. By then, he had moved to Haría, and was in the process of finalising the gifting of his previous home to the people of Lanzarote. Approaching the low, white building that’s now the César Manrique Foundation through a garden embellished with a colourful wind toy and dazzling wall mosaics, I soon decide that I’ve unwittingly left the best till last on my island odyssey.
Built in 1968 on the lunar landscape of Tahíche, near the centre of the island, Manrique’s (for me) greatest masterpiece is literally an architect’s dream house – a jaw-dropping, futuristic maze of interconnecting volcanic bubbles linked by lava tunnels. With a fig tree growing up through the floor of the living room, jewel-like water pools, Ibiza-style chill-out niches ringed by leather seating and even a small dance floor, it’s the house everyone would love to book for a party.
Tragically, the party was over far too soon for Manrique. After a meeting with the Foundation’s trustees on a sunny Friday in September 1992, he took the wheel of his beloved green Jaguar and left his former home in Tahíche for the last time to die just minutes later in a fatal collision with a four-by-four. A wind toy known as Fobos, built to his design, was erected at the roundabout near the crash scene. An intricate glittering whirligig of rotating orbs and discs, it spins like a map of the solar system. Following restoration, it’s due to be returned to the roundabout for Manrique’s centenary year - a moving memorial to Lanzarote’s superstar.
Getting there
Linda Cookson travelled as the guest of Sovereign Luxury Travel (01293 832 459, sovereign.com) which offers seven nights in the Princess Yaiza Suite Hotel Resort, a beachfront five star on Playa Blanca, from ￡755 pp, B&B; prices based on two sharing, including flights from Gatwick (with security fast passes and access to N°1 Lounge) and private resort transfers.
British Airways, easyJet, Jet2, Ryanair, Thomas Cook and TUI all fly to Lanzarote from the UK
There’s a frequent bus service (No 161) from the airport to Puerto del Carmen (￡1.25 one-way) and Playa Blanca (￡3 one-way). For Costa Teguise, take the No 22 or 23 bus to Arrecife (￡1.25), then the No 1 to the resort (￡1.25). Approximate taxi fares are ￡14 (Puerto del Carmen), ￡18 (Costa Teguise) and ￡40 (Playa Blanca). For discounted fares, book in advance via Viva Transfers (lanzarote-airport-transfers.co.uk).
Local car hire specialists CICAR (cicar.com) or Cabrera Medina (cabreramedina.com) offer seven days’ hire from around ￡85.
More on Manrique
See fcmanrique.org for the opening hours/admission prices of Manrique’s two homes. Opening hours/entry fees for other Manrique attractions are on cactlanzarote.com.
The programme of Manrique Centenary events hasn’t yet been finalised. Check out manrique100.org and fcmanrique.org for further information as it emerges.