On the road, we suddenly notice something missing: visual pollution. No advertising posters, no illuminated signs, no supermarket parking lot attacks the retina of the traveler who has just arrived in Lanzarote, the easternmost and least populated of the Canary Islands, the Spanish archipelago located off the coast of Morocco.
From one end to the other of the volcanic island, which stretches for less than sixty kilometres, white villages dotted with succulents stand out against unspoiled landscapes that range from ochre to black and the colour of bread. The houses are painted with whitewash and the shutters are dark green or indigo. At the foot of the volcanoes, lava stones placed by hand, in the style of Petit Poucet, line the paths. In this Canary archipelago that has become a symbol of mass tourism, what fairy leaned on this stone to save it from being ugly?
The answer can be found ten minutes from the airport in Arrecife, the island’s capital, in the first house that the Canarian artist César Manrique (1919-1992) had built in Lanzarote, which has been converted into a museum for the foundation that bears his name. Trained at the Fine Arts School in Madrid, this countryman rubbed shoulders with the avant-garde, especially in New York, where he frequented Andy Warhol and his gang, before returning home in the mid-1960s, when the Canary Islands discovered the economic benefits that tourism represents.
“The bad land”
With about fifteen days of rain a year, Lanzarote is the driest and poorest country in the archipelago, but its landscapes, shaped in the 18th centurymy century due to an episode of intense volcanic activity, give it a certain magnetism. Madly in love with his native island, César Manrique decided to help it develop without becoming ugly. Going against the tide of Franco’s Spain, which later defined its coastline, he placed nature at the centre of his project.
Built on a lava flow, his first residence, called “Volcano House” »It is a manifesto. The artist demonstrates that the rugged and impassable landscape that until then was called badlands (literally, in Spanish, “the bad land”) is an aesthetic resource.
In a permanent dialogue with nature, the house lets the black rock and vegetation in through its openings. In the basement, five volcanic bubbles linked by corridors drilled into the basalt are designed as real living and entertainment rooms. Swimming pool, barbecue, dance floor… there is no doubt, we are in a hedonist’s villa.
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