Lanzarote, Canary Islands – Part 1

After a really amazing day and because, after tomorrow, we are at sea again for two days, I have decided to break today into two parts, which means I’ll cover Casablanca the day after we visit. As we awoke this morning we were slipping into the harbour of Arrecife, Lanzarote, the fourth largest island on the Canary Islands. These islands, a product of ancient volcanic activity, are a province of Spain, so we were back to the Euro.

We have never been more impressed with the cleanliness and general condition of buildings in any port we’ve visited. This place is pristine! Of course, the Europeans have been coming here for years, but we North Americans still consider this a developing area. There was also next to no African presence here, despite the fact that they are only 100 km from Africa.

Thanks to new friends David & Betty, we hired two taxis for four hours with the intent of first discovering wine country and then seeing whatever sights we could fit into the day. We were also traveling with Walter & Carol, but David was the sole Spanish speaker.

As we headed west across the island, we quickly came upon this very surreal landscape with regularly spaced craters, rimmed with crescent shaped stone walls. Within each crater was one grape vine, sprawled out on the surface - more about this later. It was too early to taste wine so we headed for the fire-mountains of Timanfaya National Park. This little guy is a likeness of the devil created by Cesar Manrique. Who better to be associated with the violent volcanic activity here?

This site, on the western shore of Lanzarote, was the centre of volcanic activity on the island. Since inhabited, the island first blew up in 1730 and then again in 1824, each time for several years. It is now what we would imagine if we were on a lunar landscape, with blown-out craters and lava fields being the dominant feature.

We had to travel the narrow roads through the park in a park bus, which was just as well since anyone else would have been extremely challenged to keep their tires on the pavement and therefore avoid dumping their vehicle in a crater. They had done a nice job of reducing their “footprint” in this historic region. Although the lava has long since dried up, there is still some noteworthy volcanic activity here, with areas of hot surface ash and numerous vents giving off extreme core heat, enough to have a BBQ.

They also had vents that when fed water immediately erupted with geysers. It was not only immediate but also extremely noisy as Dawn discovered. And, we all got soaked. Before we make our way back to Arrecife, I will pause for the day, our story to be continued tomorrow.