Jardín de Cactus
Jardín de Cactus de Lanzarote
Interesting facts
- The entrance is marked by a green-painted metal cactus nearly eight metres tall, one of Manrique's signature sculptures.
- Guatiza sits among fields of prickly pears long farmed for cochineal, the insect that yields carmine dye, which is why Manrique chose cacti for the garden.
- Before Manrique transformed it, the abandoned quarry had been filled with rubbish.
- Manrique left natural pillars of weathered lava standing in the pit and treated them as sculptures in their own right.
- Many of the plants came from the collection of a cactus grower from the nearby village of Haría, and the botanist Estanislao González Ferrer chose the species.
- A candelabra euphorbia from East Africa that Manrique planted himself in January 1989 is now one of the garden's largest plants and its emblem.
- Manrique's design reaches down to small details, including door handles shaped like cacti, rubbish bins and the staff uniforms.
- Plants endemic to Lanzarote, such as Aeonium lancerottense, grow alongside saguaros from the United States and pachypodiums from Madagascar.
- Scenes for the second season of the television series Foundation were filmed in the garden.
Why it is worth it
The Jardín de Cactus fills a former quarry on the island of Lanzarote with a dense, sculptural landscape of spines, columns, globes and rosettes. Here the volcanic ash known as picón, or lapilli, was once dug out to spread over the island's fields, where it holds moisture in the soil; the artist César Manrique turned the abandoned hollow into a garden that opened in 1991, the last of the great works he created for his native island.
Manrique designed the garden as an amphitheatre. Terraces of dark volcanic stone step down into the old pit, and on them grow some 4,500 plants of about 450 species of cacti and other succulents, gathered from the deserts of the Americas, Madagascar and other dry regions of the world. Against the black ground, their shapes and shades of green, grey and silver read almost like a living sculpture garden, which is how Manrique conceived it, and the paths, walls, stairways and pools are integrated into the setting with the same care for local materials that runs through all of his projects. At the highest point stands a restored windmill that was once used to grind gofio, the toasted grain flour that is a staple of Canarian cooking.
César Manrique (1919–1992) shaped modern Lanzarote more than any other single figure: an artist who argued for development in harmony with the island's volcanic landscape and traditional architecture, and who left a series of sites, from lava caves to viewpoints, that blend art and nature. The cactus garden is a fitting conclusion to that body of work, set in the village of Guatiza in the northeast of the island, in the municipality of Teguise.
Getting there
The garden lies in Guatiza, in the municipality of Teguise in northeastern Lanzarote, about 9 km from the town of Teguise. The nearest airport is César Manrique-Lanzarote Airport (ACE), about 20 km away. The LZ-1 road, which runs north from Arrecife along the east coast of the island, passes close to the village.
Plan your visit
We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.
Nearby places
- Jameos del Agua 9.5 km · lava-tube
- Cueva de los Verdes 9.6 km · lava-tube
- Mirador del Río 14.9 km · scenic-viewpoint
- Lanzarote 16.3 km · island
- La Geria 24.8 km · vineyard-landscape
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Jardín de Cactus is a cactus garden on the island of Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. It is situated in the village of Guatiza, in a former quarry where volcanic sand lapilli was extracted to spread on cultivated areas to retain moisture. Prickly pears are grown in the area for the production of cochineal, an insect from which the natural dye carmine is derived.
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