Lanzarote, SP by Ei POiNT
It wasn’t the first time that the island was faced with strong changes in its morphology. Nature itself, in the garden of Yaiza, had buried it under a black mantle of lava the night of September 1, 1730 when the Earth opened up, right and left, and fire erupted everywhere, putting to the test the faith of the parish priest Lorenzo Curbielo. Now, however, in the second half of the 20th century, it was the hand of man that was proposing to act on the site. The greed of foreign capital had found a place with the right conditions of location, state of the territory, population and public administration for their interests. They could get an interesting cashflow through a low exposure of their own resources by appropriating the site at a low cost and at the expense of the locals.
The story goes that the rebellion of the painter and sculptor Cesar Manrique after the construction of the first high-rise “megahotel” was a warning to the local residents that culminated with an intervention in the landscape that amazes everyone who visits. This cohabitation between the hand of man and the natural physical environment leads to the marriage of a domesticated landscape: without losing the essence of the natural surroundings, the action of man is inflected in keeping with what has persisted in the place over time providing an emotional counterpoint that places importance on the people already living there. A whisper of innovation is not juxtaposed to what already exits, but highlights its value. An approach that today does not show the technology it harnesses in pursuit of evolution.
Born of fire and liberated from urban speculation, today Lanzarote is one of the sites with the greatest landscape‐tourism projection in the world – a place, biosphere reserve, whose teachings will help us to intervene and manage the territory.