Montañas del Fuego

The Montañas del Fuego — the Fire Mountains — are a crowd of volcanic cones in the heart of Lanzarote's Timanfaya National Park, their slopes streaked in rust red, ochre, black and violet ash, rising out of a sea of frozen lava that stretches towards the Atlantic. Almost nothing grows here. The landscape looks as if it cooled yesterday, and in a sense it has hardly finished: just below the surface the ground is still hot, reaching around 400 °C at a depth of two metres and some 600 °C at ten, so that water poured into a hole in the ground bursts back out as steam within seconds.

The mountains were born in one of the longest and largest basaltic eruptions in recorded history. On 1 September 1730 the ground opened near Caldera de los Cuervos, and for almost six years, until April 1736, a chain of vents along a fissure some 18 kilometres long built 32 new volcanoes. The parish priest of Yaiza, Andrés Lorenzo Curbelo, kept a detailed account of the first months. When the activity ended, lava had buried about a quarter of the island, including its most fertile farmland and eleven villages. The Fire Mountains belong to the later phases of that eruption, when the activity moved east through the aligned craters of the Calderas Quemadas towards Montaña de Timanfaya. Because the climate is so dry and erosion so slow, the forms remain almost intact: lava channels, ropy pahoehoe surfaces, small spatter cones known as hornitos, blocks of scoria and lava stalactites.

At the centre lies the Islote de Hilario, a small patch of older ground that the eighteenth-century lava flowed around rather than over — the kind of island in the lava that Lanzaroteños call an islote. Life has returned only slowly since the eruption: lichens were the first colonists, followed by a few ferns in shaded crevices and scattered hardy shrubs, and about 200 animal species, roughly half of them invertebrates, survive in this arid terrain. The area of nearly 393 hectares was declared a natural monument in 1994 within the national park, which was created in 1974 and is the only entirely geological national park in Spain. Its emblem is El Diablo, a little devil figure designed by the Lanzarote artist César Manrique. The whole island has been a UNESCO biosphere reserve since 1993.

Getting there

The Montañas del Fuego lie in Timanfaya National Park in the southwest of Lanzarote, on the boundary of the municipalities of Yaiza and Tinajo, about 5 km north of the village of Yaiza. César Manrique-Lanzarote Airport (ACE) is about 15 km away in a straight line.