We went last year and the year before, so we decided to go again one more time.

Disasters
Our beloved dog is very ill and we must decide whether we’re going to put her in for an operation that will probably kill her, or not. She’s in the dog hospital where the vets are putting pressure on us to operate. Everything is ridiculously stressful. I’ve hurt my back and can barely walk. I’m in a lot of pain. I force myself to get better for the holiday, stockpile painkillers, get up and walk before I am really ready. The night before we are due to go, Kay realises that she has lost her passport. The stress is making me ill. Simon and I go, Kay comes along a few days later. It’s hard to have fun under these circumstances but we rationalise that it’s probably better to feel stressed and cruddy under the warm sun in a beautiful landscape than in our own grey country.

Storm Delta
There’s been a hurricane. Some of the Manrique Wind Toys have been damaged and have been removed for repair. Lanzarote can’t afford to scare away tourists, so everything that was blown away has been replaced fast. The transient tourist population don’t read the papers, talk to locals or stay long enough to know what’s been going on. You could hardly guess that anything had ever happened if it weren’t for a splash of paint on the new roof.

Getting the fear
Tall waves crash onto the beach at Famara. Manrique had a summer house here but it’s not open to the public. People surf or lie in the dunes. I watch the massive, relentless waves, afraid of a tsunami.

The abandoned hotel
We follow a rough, winding track into the Rubicon desert, park when it gets too bad to drive any further, and walk towards a shell of a building on the horizon. The desert floor is spongy underfoot and littered with rocks, space plants, desert shrubs. Lizards live here, and rabbits too, I think. The building looks two-dimensional from a distance but up close we see that it is an abandoned hotel complex, half built. We can see how the capsule-like rooms would have looked, there is a pile of never-plumbed-in bathtubs disintegrating outside. It’s astonishing, like a little piece of Detroit transplanted onto a volcanic island. More astonishing is the fact that some of the rooms have been colonised by people and turned into a kind of shanty town. There are green doors, windows, and inside I see a table, neatly set with a bowl and an oilcloth, a home. Poor people live here, how can it be?

The hotel overlooks a rocky coast. The rocks nearby have been worn away by the sea and they look like dinosaur bones or the foundations of a building. We perch and watch the waves crash, ultramarine and pure foaming white, huge and awesome.

David and Ros Brawn
Brawn, not Brown, Brawn. They are brawny. David and Ros wrote an opinionated book about walking in Lanzarote, which I bought. My illness means that I’m not able to walk as much as I’d hoped. When I’m resting at home I read the book regardless. The Brawns write about the landscape with admiration, which is unusual, most non-islanders I’ve come across seem to think that Lanzarote is an ugly, barren place. Their routes are interesting and well-described. But those Brawns! So judgmental and superior! They deride couch potatoes, which pisses me off, they crow about their GPS mapping and they sneer at other, lesser walking books about Lanzarote. Those Brawns! They pooh-pooh some of the Manrique design in the road, they refer to Wind Toys as "thingies," they don’t even know the real name and they don’t care. David’s there in his baseball cap and neck cover, Ros rests in her sandals, they look so fit and smug, they survey the land around them. Even the most well-intentioned visitors to Lanzarote are parasites. I come to regard David and Ros as friends I don’t really like.

I still love César Manrique
We find our way to three lesser-known Manrique places.

LagOmar is the compound he built for Omar Sharif on the hill behind Nazaret. Sharif no longer owns it, the story goes that he lost it in a poker game, so now it’s a restaurant and bar that’s open to the public. There’s a central pool from which snake tunnels, hidden stairways and terraces. My favourite tunnel has a strip of wood-topped stepping stones over a flooded floor. Rooms are indoors and out, free-form, blobby, white plaster and volcanic rock. Balconies and secret nooks have been fashioned onto the (sandstone?) cliff that rises up in the background. A bar has been built inside a natural cave. Exotic flowers bloom, weird Manrique sculptures are everywhere. There is a room in which stands an empty cage, like an aviary that’s big enough for a vulture or a go-go girl. There are small guest apartments where it’s possible to stay.

Manrique designed some of the public areas in the Hotel Gran Meliá Salinas at Costa Teguise in the mid-70s. The lobby features some excellent murals, and there is an indoor/outdoor mini-rainforest, with smooth wooden walkways, ponds and trailing vines, probably the greenest place on the whole island. It’s beautiful. The big thing is the main swimming pool. Manrique understood the pleasure to be found in pools, maybe understandable since Lanzarote is such a dry place. Swimming is for guests only, which would have made me cry had we visited on a day that was warm enough for swimming. The pool is really beautiful: it’s free-form and blobby, lined and surrounded with shiny white plaster studded with black volcanic rock. In and around the pool, Manrique has built bridges, hidden caves, grottoes, platforms and islands for bathers to explore. It is stunning, one of the best pools I’ve ever seen.

La Era is a restaurant at Yaiza that serves traditional Canarian cuisine. It was patronised and developed by Manrique in order to celebrate the local culture. The dining rooms are set around a courtyard, it’s pretty traditional, no blobby plaster. The food and service are excellent, with vegetarian dishes too. I ask for a calvados and the woman brings a bottle inside which is a giant apple. She pours me a big glass full and laughs at my greedy saucer eyes.

Inside the volcano
The Brawns direct us to an easy walk that leads inside and around Montana Cuervo, which is a volcano. From the outside, the cone is maybe five or six times as high as a house, it’s hard to tell, probably taller. There are track marks on the outside, and marks where people have skidded down the outside. These marks will stay there forever. The cone is grey, orange, red, beige, colours merging into each other. The circumnavigatory path passes through glades of wild desert plants, varying lava types, it’s constantly changing. Inside the volcano, the crater is covered with tiny gravelly rock and littered with larger rocks and blobs of molten rock. The floor of the crater, and its rim, are circular, long, but rough and messy. Messy, yet ordered, ordered by a series of explosions that happened a long time ago. Time stands still. The air is motionless, the sunlight weird, like an eclipse is happening, or a filter has been applied to a lens. It’s like a purgatory. Birdsong sounds closer than it is. Sound is clear yet confusing. Walkers on the rim sound as though they are right behind me. I lie on the ground for some time, I wish I’d stayed there longer.



Here's a film that shows what the inside of the crater was like (.mov, 5.5mb)

Peace
The sun on my back makes me feel secure, loved, reassured. At night we bob and float in our pool, under a clear sky filled with stars.

Bickering idiots
Simon and I visit the Mirador del Rio again because it is a beautiful place to be. It’s easy to love the architecture and the ambience, not to mention the unfailingly polite and courteous staff, but the other visitors are awful. Maybe it’s just the English-speaking visitors, since they’re the only ones I understand. A mean mum yells at her kid, who is upset. A nuclear family bicker over who gets to use the binoculars. People in ugly tourist clothes are obsessed by the ravens who live on the cliffs and scavenge from the bins, they film every moment. Burping German thugs. A young Australian couple ask themselves where they are. They don’t even know where they’ve come! After a while she looks at the leaflet she was given with her ticket and says: “It’s Mirador, Rio, or some such shite.” He doesn’t know if he’s “on a volcano” or not, but decides that he probably is. They are sullen, unimpressed by this most beautiful place. They get in their car and drive away.

It doesn’t have a name on the map
The beach I love best is on the north part of the island, near Orzola, and I don’t know what it’s called. Lava flows and sand have formed a series of lagoons that are shallow enough to wade when the tide is out. The jagged black rock contrasts with the blue sky and a seam of crashing surf on the distant horizon. There are loads and loads of fish in the lagoon. If you take some scraps with which to feed them, hundreds, thousands of fish will swim to you, from silvery fish an inch long to larger grey ones of a handspan and a half. They are unafraid of you. The sun on the water creates hallucinatory patterns and the fish disappear and reappear in the shadows. It is magical.

Lost
I can’t find my way out of Arrecife. We end up driving through backstreets, getting more and more lost. Roads peter out. People look really poor. I wonder how many of them work in the hotels up the coast. Houses are ragged and rough. Tourism and poverty make regular bedfellows. More villas are being built every day, a beach was turned into the Rubicon Marina, a development of tourist restaurants and shops. Tourists prefer the fake to the real, you don’t see so many of them in the streets of Arrecife.

In local news
Ikea are opening an outlet. The Sandals all-inclusive resort is putting people out of business because tourists never leave the compound.