Lanzarote

Lanzarote's black-and-red volcanic badlands aren't ancient history — they're the result of an eruption sequence that ran from 1730 to 1736, one of the longest continuously documented volcanic events anywhere in recorded history, and one that buried a third of the island's most fertile land under lava in the process. Timanfaya National Park, the protected core of that eruption zone, still runs warm just beneath the surface: dig a hole a few centimetres deep in some spots and you'll feel heat rising from rock that hasn't fully cooled in nearly three centuries.

What makes Lanzarote unusual among volcanic islands is that one artist got to decide, almost single-handedly, how the island would present that landscape to the world. César Manrique, a Lanzarote-born painter and architect who returned home in the 1960s after building a career in New York and Madrid, convinced local authorities to ban billboards and cap building heights across the island, then built a series of public attractions directly into the volcanic terrain itself rather than beside it — a cave system turned concert hall at Jameos del Agua, a clifftop lookout built into a lava tube at Mirador del Río, and, at Timanfaya's edge, the El Diablo restaurant, where the kitchen grill is powered entirely by geothermal heat rising straight out of a borehole drilled into the volcano.

The result is an island where the tourist infrastructure and the geology are unusually hard to separate: Manrique's buildings were designed to vanish into cliffs and lava fields rather than stand out against them, which means visitors often experience his architecture as "scenery" before they realise it was built at all.

Good to know

Private vehicles aren't allowed into the Timanfaya volcanic core — visitors see the crater landscape via a guided coach tour along the Ruta de los Volcanes, the only way in.

Getting there

4 km from San Bartolomé. César Manrique-Lanzarote Airport (ACE) is about 10 km away.