“Lantharote is a place of secrets and mysteries,” Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar once said of the place he used as the backdrop for his 2009 film Broken Embraces. “After setting foot on the island, the tensions I bring from Madrid disappear, as if this land had healing properties.”
Mr. Almodóvar’s words, in a 2008 interview with the Spanish newspaper El Diario, ignited my own fascination with Lanzarote, the easternmost of the seven main Canary Islands.
His description also made it sound like the ideal destination for those attending Pride events in nearby Gran Canaria, an island that is one of Europe’s most popular gay destinations. So this May, as revelers flock to Gran Canaria, I went to Lanzarote.
After the 45-minute flight from lush Gran Canaria, the peaceful, black and brown landscape came as a shock. To top it all off, I drove up the Montaña de Guanapay, a steep hill about 1,440 feet above the village of Teguise, crowned by the Castle of Santa Bárbara.
It was here in the early 14th century that Lancelotto Malocello, a Genoese merchant and navigator, built a watchtower. Malocello left the island 20 years later due to the rebellion of the Guanche, the native Berbers of the island, who were later assimilated into Spanish settlements. But the navigator lives on as the likely source of Lanzarote’s name, and the view is still impressive.
Compared to its much busier and palm-fringed sister island, Lanzarote is barren, with the occasional low-lying village of whitewashed houses appearing like spider webs on the slopes of the mostly dormant volcanoes that created the island. It was a strange place. I loved it immediately.
I also understood why the drier and windier of the big Canary Islands has quietly become a new haven for Spanish and other European creatives, as well as a growing number of Americans, now that there are direct flights from Newark to Tenerife. Lanzarote is a primeval spot that sweeps your head with vast horizons that echo into eternity.
A seductive charm
About 80 miles off the coast of Morocco, Lanzarote (Lahn-zah-ROH-tay) shares the renegade aura of longtime LGBTQ destinations like Key West, Fla., and Provincetown, Mass., in the United States. Not surprisingly, the island has captivated many artists, writers and celebrities, including actor Omar Sharif, Portuguese novelist José Saramago. César Manrique, a visionary painter and architect and Lanzarote’s most famous son, returned to the island and forged his unique identity by leading the fight to protect it from high-rise hotels and billboards.
I quickly found myself agreeing with Mr. Almodóvar: I felt safe and nurtured by this island as well. Maybe because the Conejeros, or people from Lanzarote, are generally kind. When I unknowingly drove the wrong way down a one-way street in Teguise, a woman darted out of a bakery, waved her finger, and handed me a sugar cookie filled with fig jam. Then she told me that it would be easier for her to drive me to my hotel. He entered and took me to the Palacio Ico, an atmospheric nine-room hotel created by the Swiss artist Heidi Bucher when she renovated a Canary Islands mansion built in 1690.
While relaxing with a glass of cold, dry Lanzarote white wine on the covered gallery outside my spacious room, two French guys I recognized from the plane came up the stairs from the courtyard below. I dare to make a “bonsoir”.
We talked. This was my first time in Lanzarote, but like almost every other foreigner I met during my three days 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 go for a couple of times,” said one of the men. They had just been to the last three days of the Pride celebrations in Gran Canaria. “Lantharote is the perfect place to unwind after Pride,” said the other.
They invited me to join them for dinner, but I already had plans to meet a lesbian friend from Edinburgh who was staying at the shiny new César Lanzarote hotel. We decided to have lunch the next day.
He was sitting at the bar with two Swedish surfers when I arrived. The men, a couple who travel frequently to Lanzarote, store their boards in a locker to use at Famara Beach during their trips.
The food at Restaurant César was delicious, including wrinkled Canarian potatoes with mojo, the spicy sauce that is a staple on local tables. Grilled red shrimp; and a tortilla with ropa vieja (pulled beef) and vegetables.
I came home late and sat outside looking at the infinity of bright stars. I felt an undercurrent of adrenaline, like the one I felt the first time I went to the gay enclave of Fire Island Pines in New York. Then, also in Lanzarote, this came from the unconscious pleasure of meeting interesting people who happened to be gay.
Wine bottles and lava tubes
Given the wind and hot temperatures, Lanzarote may seem like an unlikely place for wine production, but vines have become an essential part of the island’s ecosystem. In the last 10 years, the number of DO (or Appellation of Origin) wineries on the island has more than doubled, to 21.
The Spanish first brought vines to the Canary Islands in the mid-15th century, and the excellence of the islands’ wines explains the frequent references to them in Shakespeare’s plays and the name of Canary Wharf in London, where the imports were unloaded.
Since 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 different tours for groups of no more than eight.
Our Spanish guide, who had originally moved to Lanzarote from Madrid, led us on several exciting vineyard walks through the jet black fields. Here we saw how the local vines are planted individually behind low half-moon shaped walls called zocos to protect them from the wind.
I then met the French couple for lunch at Bar Strava, near the Charco de Sant Ginés, a saltwater lagoon in the heart of Arrecife, Lanzarote’s largest town.
As it was one of their favorite Lanzarote restaurants, I let them order our tapas feast. We ate grilled morcilla (blood pudding sausage) with caramelized onion and green pepper jam, brava potatoes with kimchi mayonnaise, and grilled octopus with mojo sauce. The food was excellent, but we didn’t linger.
After lunch, we set off to discover César Manrique’s legacy. “He is one of the most exciting post-war artists in Europe, but he is little known today beyond Lanzarote. I think his bisexuality hindered his career,” said one of my lunch companions. Manrique, who was once married, never spoke about his sexuality, but the César Manrique Foundation in Lanzarote confirms that he was probably bisexual.
Manrique was born in Lanzarote in 1919, studied architecture in Tenerife and then art in Madrid. In 1964, he moved to New York, where he exhibited his paintings at the Guggenheim Museum and the Catherine Viviano Gallery, meeting artists such as Andy Warhol.
In 1966, he returned to Lanzarote and began work on his first project there, Jameos del Agua, an artistic and cultural center built inside a volcanic tunnel. A jameo is a large cave-like opening in a lava tube, created when part of the roof collapses.
“Manrique believed that anything man made should simply make the landscape more beautiful,” I heard a guide say as we entered a natural amphitheater overlooking a pool inhabited by albino crabs. We then moved on to a man-made turquoise lake with a white-painted shoreline, a cactus garden created by Manrique inside an old volcanic sand quarry, and the amazing Mirador del Río crow’s nest, which offered stunning views of Lanzarote’s north coast.
At the César Manrique Foundation, his former home, we explored a wild clan of subterranean chambers created by giant bubbles in hardened lava with decor reminiscent of both James Bond and the 1960s sci-fi film Barbarella. Apart from the glamour, it was also a poignant place that expressed the sensitive personality of the artist, who died in a car accident in 1992.
Alone for dinner, I sampled chef Victor Valverde’s contemporary Canarian cooking at Palacio Ico’s restaurant. The €90 ($96) tasting menu included salmorejo soup made with organic local Tinajo tomatoes and topped with smoked goat cheese ice cream. red shrimp in ginger-lime sauce. black pig cheek with thyme demi-glace and gofio mousse with salted caramel sauce (gofio is a traditional flour of the Canary Islands).
At the end of this excellent meal, I spoke to the chef and learned that he was from Madrid, had trained with Michelin three-star chef Martín Berasategui in the Basque Country and worked in London before falling in love with Lanzarote five years ago. “I try to use as much traditional island-grown produce as possible, and the limitations of this gardening are very encouraging for me as a chef,” Mr. Valverde said, adding, “Me siento tan libre aquí” — “I feel so free here ».
I did that too.
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