What I Did in the Holidays

If holidays are an attempt to compress pleasure into a time-frame that must be experienced somewhere else, the most popular somewhere-elses seem to be islands. Perhaps it's their blissful sense of utter separateness from the rest of the world, their womb-like borders and the soothing metaphorical significance of their soporific shores. So it's not surprising that many imagined Utopias (the thinking person's holiday resort?) have been set on islands: Swift's, Moore's and Huxley's, for example. While eluding an absolute definition, this genre of idea-as-place is inevitably imagined within certain parameters - you have to go on a long voyage to reach a Utopia, and when you arrive your eyes are opened to how life might be lived, which is when you have to accept, for the good of all, a political manifesto. All of which, strangely enough, could apply to a visit to Lanzarote.

To get an image of the most easterly of the Canary Islands, consider this: early American astronauts were shown photographs of its landscape to familiarise them with the Moon. Although only 50 kilometres long and 20 wide, from 1730-36 more than 30 fully active volcanoes vented their spleen, destroying villages and forcing islanders to flee to more hospitable shores. After years of sporadic activity, the final eruption occurred in 1824 when the volcano Tinguaton blew its top. Great rivers of lava transformed three quarters of the island into a kind of giant sculpture park crafted by mother nature's ferocious hand: mountainous metallic coils and grotesquely contorted lumps, petrified ochre waves and a poisonous black granola cover thousands of grim acres. The place names sound like something out of Tolkien - driving through the vast and spooky Badlands, you reach the Valley of Tranquillity before returning to the Fire Mountain and the Raven's Crater. Houses rise like space pods from the lava; you can't imagine people popping next door for a cup of sugar - they'd cut their feet to pieces. But to say that the landscape is lunar only hints at its strange sense of dislocation: imagine moon-walking, but under brilliant blue skies and in a thin dress.

Despite its astonishing beauty, Lanzarote is a silent, pock-marked place, as melancholy as an aristocrat forced into service. And no wonder. As well as its penchant for geological tantrums, for many years the island was subject to regular, murderous invasions by foreign predators. The most recent and potentially most destructive, however, arrived not on pirate ships but on charter planes. Lanzarote has now become synonymous, in British minds at least, with the cut-price trinity of sun, sea and sex - a kind of Spanish Blackpool, complete with smutty postcards, British pubs broadcasting British Sky Channel, British food and areas which serve almost exclusively British customers. That these imported pleasures are often at odds with the local culture is rarely considered. Although the island has a population of only 80,000, in recent years the annual numbers of visitors has increased to almost 1.5 million. The factors that once kept generations of islanders on the brink of starvation have now become the source of unprecedented prosperity - heat, drought and a harsh landscape.

That the island hasn't been effectively destroyed is largely due to the influence of the late César Manrique - utopian, artist, decorator, ecologist, architect, gardener, photographer, town planner, and designer. 'All my art is, essentially, vulcanology and geology', he modestly claimed in the 70s. 1 His work is subliminally evident in the island's lack of insensitive high-rise building and the absence of advertising hoardings. On the road, it's impossible not to notice that the centre of just about every one of the island's ubiquitous and often bewildering roundabouts supports an enormous, brightly coloured, kinetic wind sculpture. The more you start wondering about them, the more often you see them - smaller spinning sculptures in the middle of minor roads, and huge, quasi-psychedelic ones that seem to straddle the distant shimmering tarmac like some kind of art mirage rising from the ashes of a package holiday.

Born in Lanzarote in 1919, Manrique lived as a painter in Madrid and New York until the late 60s, when he returned to his birthplace and was horrified by the changes he found. In 1968 he published his elegiac Lanzarote Arquitectura Inédita, a book of photographs cataloguing every house on the island, and bought his considerable powers of persuasion to bear on the island's governing body to protect Lanzarote's character. Thanks to his efforts, development was zoned and permitted only if it blended with the vernacular style, and electricity and telephone cables were hidden underground. But, despite the fact that he never trained as an architect, perhaps his most extraordinary legacy is his architecture.

Jameo is a Spanish word which describes a volcanic tube whose roof has collapsed, leaving nothing but a hole through to the open air. Two of these holes and the lava canal that linked them formed the basis for Manrique's first major design, the tourist centre Jameos del Agua (1966), which was a foul-smelling rubbish dump before construction began. It includes a restaurant which is illuminated during the day by the natural light that streams down from the holes in the volcanic rock, and overlooks a deep natural pool filled with tiny, phosphorescent, blind albino crabs that twinkle in the night. Hidden speakers pipe loops of Brian Eno's early ambient music through the space. A narrow path leads to another bar carved from the rock, while upstairs a cave has been transformed into a concert hall. A blindingly white swimming pool, shaped like a jellyfish and filled with black volcanic rocks, looks like the result of Verner Panton designing sets for the Flintstones. At night, the place is almost deliriously lovely - the swimming pool shimmers among lava walls like a bottomless blob of luminous paint; softly lit doorways seem to appear out of nowhere; and whitewashed, flower-lined paths link different spaces with the strange logic of a child's drawings. It's important to note that not only is Jameos del Aqua a wonderful imaginative feat, but it also functions well - despite the huge amount of visitors, it never feels overcrowded or noisy.

Describing his relationship with the island, Manrique wrote in 1975 that 'to drink in, and be in direct contact with the calcinated magmas of Timanfaya fires restlessness for complete freedom; a strange feeling of clairvoyance into time and space takes over'. 2 His writing increasingly became concerned with the possibility of creating a model environment in Lanzarote. 'Every step we take must be a further contribution to the ideal space of Utopia', he exhorted hopefully to his fellow islanders. 3 Over the next 20 years he designed seven centres of art, culture and tourism across the island, including: a restaurant which cooks its food over an smouldering crater; a circular bar and information centre built from glass and stone set into the side of a volcano looking directly over the Atlantic; a monument and museum to celebrate the peasants' heroic struggle in wresting a living from the island's harsh soil; a Modern Museum of Art created from the ruins of a castle; a garden of ten thousand varieties of cactus built on a disused volcanic ash quarry; and - the ultimate bachelor pad - Omar Sharif's island hideaway (now a restaurant). When he died in 1992, Manrique was working on a wind museum to complement Lanzarote's large wind-energy plant. He never accepted payment for his designs and presented the island with his villa, now a museum dedicated to his memory. It's a fabulous dwelling, built within a series of volcanic bubbles surrounded by gardens and deep green pools.

As a kind of natural extension of Manrique's ideas, over the last twelve years the island has held the annual 'Lanzarote Visual Music Festival' - two weeks of idiosyncratic concerts by musicians from around the world. Selected by Ildefonso Aguilar de la Rúa, the concerts are held in natural venues across the island, from caves to volcanic craters. Brian Eno (who described the island as 'floating somewhere between the moon and the sun') has also been closely involved in the development of the festival, which attempts to explore new ways of 'seeing' music. Despite their disparate backgrounds, the musicians - from Terry Riley, to Paul Schutze and Alberto Iglesias - are linked by an approach best described by Gertrude Stein when she commanded composers to 'think of your ears as eyes'.

In 1993 UNESCO declared the island a World Reserve of the Biosphere, an aptly sci-fi-sounding title, which defines the island as an environment in which people and nature interact to their mutual benefit. Although it's a designation intended to ensure that ecological balance will be retained alongside restricted tourist development, you get the sense that given a few greedy developers and a couple of corrupt politicians, Manrique's pragmatic idealism - and the island that gave birth to it - might quickly be eroded. In 1986, Manrique, despairing at the still too rapid growth of development on the island, delivered a manifesto to the Spanish king entitled Lanzarote is Dying. 'A small island must be like a theatre', he wrote, 'when all the seats are taken, then no more tickets can be sold.' 4