Buckets, spades – and a real volcano

A family holiday to Lanzarote provided just the right mix of beach and geological wonder, says Tom Chivers

The view, as you fly into Lanzarote, is unusual. It’s not white sand and sunburnt hills: it looks black, almost dirty. Closer to land, the earth is shattered, roads winding between dark rocks. The rubble appears freshly churned.

If you didn’t know better, you could see it as ugly; slag-heaps or building sites. But in fact it’s the remnants of a huge, devastating volcanic eruption that scoured the island between 1730 and 1736. It is a spectacular reminder of the power of the Earth.

The idea was to see if my kids – or, really, the elder one, Billy, who’s four; Ada, at two, is a bit young – would appreciate seeing that power close up, and learn something from it. It would be a sort of bucket-and-spade holiday with added educational value. Billy had recently been learning about volcanoes at preschool, and found them fascinating. But the classic volcanic geology holiday to Iceland seemed a bit much; they’re only little, and I still wanted to throw them in a paddling pool from time to time while I had a beer on a sun lounger.

It was a spectacular success. Lanzarote was the best holiday the little Chivers family has ever been on.

The success lay, in part, because Billy is getting more biddable as he gets older. Until now, holidays with children were fun but not exactly relaxing; now, things that we simply couldn’t have done a year ago – such as family dinners out – were stress-free, enjoyable. Also easing the holiday was the fact that the resort we stayed in, the Princesa Yaiza in Playa Blanca, on the island’s south-western tip, was so well set up for young families.

But credit for the triumph sits also with this island: there is so much to do in Lanzarote. We turned down the organised tours – they sounded interesting, but at eight hours long, too much for toddlers. Instead, we rented a car and on our first day drove 10 miles (16km) up the coast to El

Golfo, a black-sand beach.

As we drove, Billy was full of questions. “Are volcanoes in real life?” he asked, nervously. “Will they burn us?” I explained that these are old volcanoes, dormant, which means asleep. They’re still hot, but the heat is deep beneath us. The red stuff, the lava or magma you see coming out of the top in films, that’s underground. You won’t see that. Billy nodded, apparently satisfied.

El Golfo is a little village based around a strange green lagoon, separated from the stark blue-andwhite of the Atlantic Ocean by a strip of dark volcanic sand, although the two are linked by underground channels. We’d been a bit nervous about it, because we’d read it was a little underwhelming and that the “green lagoon” was insufficiently green. But it was wonderful.

Formed in the halfsunken crater of an extinct volcano, the lagoon is indeed green – the product of volcanic minerals and unique bacteria that live on them. It’s not lurid, but it’s certainly noticeable. And the climb up to the viewing point is exactly the level of difficulty you want when you’re wearing flip-flops and

HANDS-ON LEARNINGBilly plays by the shore, left; Timanfaya’s moonscape, right