“Lanzarote is a place full of secrets and mysteries,” Spanish director Pedro Almodovar once said about the place he used as the setting for his 2009 film “Embrace Wounds.” “When you step onto the island, all the tension you brought with you from Madrid disappears. It's as if the land has a healing power.”
Something Almodovar said in a 2008 interview with the Spanish newspaper El Diario piqued my interest in Lanzarote, the easternmost of the Canary Islands' seven main islands.
From his description, the island also seemed like an ideal relaxation spot for people attending the Pride event in Gran Canaria, one of Europe's most popular gay destinations.So this May, while revelers flocked to Gran Canaria, I headed to Lanzarote.
After a 45-minute flight from lush Gran Canaria, I was struck by the arid, black-and-brown landscape, and to see it all, I drove up Monte Guanapay, a steep hill some 1,440 feet above the village of Teguise, topped by Santa Bárbara Castle.
In the early 14th century, Genoese merchant and navigator Lancelot Malocello built a watchtower here. He left the island 20 years later due to a rebellion by the island's indigenous Berber Guanches, who were later assimilated into the Spanish settlement. But the navigator is believed to be the inspiration for Lanzarote's name, and the island's scenery remains spectacular today.
Compared to its much busier, palm-dotted sister island, Lanzarote is barren, with the occasional low-lying village, its spidery whitewashed houses clustered against the slopes of the nearly dormant volcano that formed the island. It was a strange place. And I quickly fell in love with it.
And with the new direct flight from Newark to Tenerife, it's easy to see why the driest and windiest of the Canary Islands has become a secluded new retreat for Spaniards and other European creatives, and increasingly, Americans.Lanzarote is a pristine place, with vast horizons that ring eternally.
Captivating Charm
Located about 80 miles off the coast of Morocco, Lanzarote exudes the same rebellious vibe as longtime LGBTQ destinations like Key West, Florida, and Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the United States. It's no wonder the island has attracted many artists, writers and celebrities, including actor Omar Sharif and Portuguese novelist José Saramago. Visionary painter and architect César Manrique, Lanzarote's most famous son, returned to help shape the island's unique identity by leading the fight to protect it from high-rise hotels and billboards.
I soon realized I agreed with Almodóvar. I felt safe and valued on the island, perhaps because Lanzarote's people are generally hospitable Conejeros. As I unwittingly drove the wrong way down a one-way street in Teguise, a woman jumped out of a bakery, waving her finger and handing me a sugar-dusted cookie filled with fig jam. She suggested it would be easier if she drove me to the hotel. She hopped in her car and took me to Palacio Ico, an atmospheric nine-room hotel restored from a 1690 Canarian villa by Swiss artist Heidi Butcher.
As I was relaxing in the covered gallery outside my spacious room with a glass of chilled, dry Lanzarote white wine, two French men I recognised from the plane came climbing the stairs from the courtyard below. I called out a “bonsoir!”
We chatted and although it was their first time in Lanzarote, like most of the other foreigners I met during the three days I spent there, they had been to the island many times before.
“We both travel a lot for work and Lanzarote is one of our favorite places to spend time together as a couple,” says one of the men. They had just attended the last three days of Pride festival in Gran Canaria. “Lanzarote is the perfect place to unwind after Pride,” says the other.
They invited me to dinner, but I already had plans to meet up with a lesbian friend from Edinburgh who was staying at the gorgeous new Cesar Lanzarote Hotel, so we decided to have lunch the next day instead.
When I arrived, she was sitting at the bar with two Swedish surfers, a couple who travel to Lanzarote frequently and keep their surfboards in a locker to use at Famara Beach during their trips.
The food at Cesar Restaurant was delicious, including wrinkled Canary potatoes drizzled in mojo, a spicy dipping sauce that's a staple on the local dining table, grilled red shrimp, and ropa vieja (pulled beef) and vegetable tortillas.
Returning home late and sitting outside gazing at the endless splendor of the stars, I felt the same undercurrent of adrenaline I’d felt the first time I’d visited the gay enclave of Fire Island Pines in New York, and then again in Lanzarote, from the unconscious joy of meeting interesting people who happened to be gay.
Wine bottles and lava tubes
With its winds and scorching temperatures, Lanzarote might not seem like an ideal place to produce wine, but vines are an essential part of the island's ecosystem: Over the past decade, the number of DO (Designated Origin) wineries on the island has more than doubled, to 21.
The Spanish first brought vines to the Canaries in the mid-15th century, and the excellence of Canary Island wine is so prominent that it features frequently in Shakespeare's plays and even gives its name to the London town of Canary Wharf, where imports are unloaded.
Because wine tasting is an inherently social activity, I booked a three-and-a-half-hour morning tour with Wine Tours Lanzarote, which offers a variety of tours for groups of eight or less.
Our Spanish guide, who originally moved to Lanzarote from Madrid, led us on a walk through the enchanting vineyards set in pitch-black fields, where we saw how local vines are planted individually behind low, half-moon shaped walls called zocos to protect the vines from the wind.
Afterwards, I had lunch with a French couple at Bar Strava, near Charco de Sant Gines, a saltwater lagoon in the center of Arrecife, Lanzarote's largest town.
As it was their favourite Lanzarote restaurant they had us order some tapas dishes – we had grilled morcilla (blood pudding sausage) with caramelised onion and pepper jam, patatas bravas with kimchi mayonnaise and grilled octopus with mojo sauce – the food was excellent but we didn't stay long.
After lunch we set off to visit Cesar Manrique's estate. “He is one of the most fascinating post-war artists in Europe, but today he is little known outside Lanzarote. I think his bisexuality hindered his career,” said one of my lunch companions. Manrique, who was once married, never spoke about his sexual orientation, but the Cesar Manrique Foundation in Lanzarote confirms that he was probably bisexual.
Born in Lanzarote in 1919, Manrique studied architecture in Tenerife and then art in Madrid before moving to New York in 1964, where he exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum and the Catherine Bibiano Gallery, and became friends with artists such as Andy Warhol.
In 1966, he returned to Lanzarote to begin work on his first project there, Jameos del Agua, an arts and culture center built inside a volcanic tunnel: a large, cavernous opening in a lava tube created when part of the ceiling collapsed.
“Manrique believed that everything humans make can only make the landscape more beautiful,” we heard our guide say as we entered a natural amphitheater overlooking a pond inhabited by albino crabs. We then continued on to a man-made turquoise lake with a whitewashed shoreline, a cactus garden that Manrique created amongst old volcanic sand quarries, and the stunning Mirador del Rio Crow's Nest, with spectacular views of Lanzarote's north coast.
At the César Manrique Foundation, his former home, we explored a labyrinth of wild underground rooms carved out of giant bubbles of solidified lava and decorated in the vein of James Bond and the 1960s sci-fi film Barbarella. It was glamorous but also a moving expression of the sensitive personality of the artist, who died in a car accident in 1992.
For dinner alone, I sampled chef Victor Valverde's contemporary Canarian cuisine at Palacio Hico restaurant, where the 90-euro ($96) tasting menu included salmorejo soup made with local organic Tinajo tomatoes and served with smoked goat cheese ice cream, red shrimp in ginger-lime sauce, black pork cheek with thyme demi-glace, and gofio mousse (gofio is a traditional flour from the Canary Islands) with salted caramel sauce.
At the end of this fantastic meal, I spoke to the chef and learned that he's originally from Madrid, trained under three-star Michelin chef MartÃn Berasategui in the Basque Country, worked in London, and then fell in love with Lanzarote five years ago. “I try to use traditional ingredients from the island as much as possible. This limitation of my pantry is a big inspiration for me as a chef,” Valverde said, adding, “I feel very free here.”
I did it too.
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