The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
HELL’S KITCHEN
The impish wooden signpost El Diablo (The Devil) that welcomes you to the Timanfaya National Park was created by Manrique. His geothermal circular restaurant of the same name is like a space station built from lava-bricks and commands astonishing 360-degree views over coppery rivers of petrified lava. Meat and fish is grilled on a barbecue over a giant pit fired by the (dormant) volcano (0034
928 840 057, cactlanzarote. com/en/cact/ montanas-delfuego-timanfaya). the coast. And I doubt that Manrique would have been overfond of some of the waterfront’s more garish fast-food arcades and shopping malls. But the hotels of the three purpose-built tourist areas – Costa Teguise, Puerto del Carmen and Playa Blanca – also include some fabulously classy designer specials amid their ice-white curves and coronets. Manrique himself landscaped the gardens and exotically planted pool area of the island’s flagship Meliá hotel in Costa Teguise.
Elsewhere, the heart of the island still beats to the tune of its simpler, more rural past. Passing through the coal-black lava fields of the winegrowing region La Geria, I watch straw-hatted farmers with rakes cultivating individual vines behind semicircular zocos (lava walls). On the roundabout by Montaña Blanca village, I encounter one of Manrique’s own takes on perpetuating
Lanzarote’s history – a playful Juguete del Viento ( Wind Toy). Installed at various points across the island, these giant mobiles are his homage to the vanished windmills of his childhood. At the very centre of the island, I pull up beside his towering Lego-like sculpture Fecundidad (Fertility) – also known as El Monumento al
Campesino (Monument to the Fieldworker). It’s made from the water tanks of old boats and is dedicated “to the nameless farmers whose hard work helped to create the island’s unique landscape”.
The jury still seems to be out on exactly what Fecundidad represents. A man and his dog, or a solitary camel, are the front runners – but it could just as easily be neither. The joy of Manrique’s work is that ordinary people love to engage with it. Fittingly, his most spectacular legacy to the island of his birth is a show-stopping series of public attractions created in harmony with the land.
Manrique preferred to call these constructions intervenciones (“interventions”). All are on sites imbued with a special spirit of place – his Mirador del Rio lookout, for instance, perches like an eagle’s nest on Lanzarote’s northern cape, with mesmerising views over the birdsanctuary island of La Graciosa. And all include restaurants (Manrique loved dining out with friends), so visitors can interact with the natural surroundings in a relaxed, social setting.
Jameos del Agua, which opened in the late Sixties as the first of Manrique’s “interventions”, is a breathtaking fantasy grotto by the north-east coast, built around a volcanic tunnel that collapsed to create a sequence of roofless, sunken caves ( jameos). The complex includes an atmospheric garden-cave restaurant, with giant ferns suspended from the rock face in lobster pots, a magical underground lagoon where rare albino crabs flicker like stars, and a palm-fringed turquoise pool with a white concrete “beach”. There’s also a 600-seater concert hall. Hollywood legend Rita Hayworth called it “the Eighth Wonder of the World”.
Manrique’s personal favourite among his interventions was the quirky Jardín de Cactus in the small town of Guatiza, a 15-minute drive south from Jameos del Agua. Set in a former quarry, it’s planted with thousands of cacti arranged like exhibits in a Mad Hatter’s sculpture park. Taking a pit-stop before continuing on my travels, I’m amused to discover that the restaurant serves vegetarian cactus burgers in bright red buns (a nod to the cochineal
beetles cultivated in the cactus fields). They taste better than they look.
Jardín de Cactus opened in 1991 and was to be the last of Manrique’s great projects. By then, he had moved to Haría, and was in the process of finalising the gifting of his previous home to the people of Lanzarote. Approaching the low, white building that’s now the César Manrique Foundation through a garden embellished with a colourful wind toy and dazzling wall mosaics, I soon decide that I’ve unwittingly left the best until last on my island odyssey.
Built in 1968 on the lunar landscape of Tahíche, near the centre of the island, Manrique’s (for me) greatest masterpiece is literally an architect’s dream house – a jawdropping, futuristic maze of interconnecting volcanic bubbles linked by lava tunnels. With a fig tree growing up through the floor of the living room, jewel-like water pools, Ibiza-style chill-out niches ringed by leather seating and even a small dance floor, it’s the house everyone would love to book for a party. Tragically, the party was over far too soon for Manrique. After a meeting with the foundation’s trustees on a sunny Friday in September 1992, he took the wheel of his beloved green Jaguar and left his former home in Tahíche for the last time to die just minutes later in a collision with a 4x4. A wind toy known as Fobos, built to his design, was erected at the roundabout near the crash scene. An intricate glittering whirligig of rotating orbs and discs, it spins like a map of the solar system. Following restoration, it’s due to be returned to the roundabout for Manrique’s centenary year – a moving memorial to Lanzarote’s superstar.