There is a phrase every Lanzarote islander knows, though they may not always know where it comes from: “an enormous mountain rose from the depths of the earth, and flames escaped from its summit”. A village parish priest wrote it by hand while the ground beneath his feet was literally splitting in two.[1]
On 1 September 1730, between nine and ten at night, the earth suddenly opened near Timanfaya, two leagues from Yaiza.[2] So begins the account of Don Andrés Lorenzo Curbelo, the village parish priest, who, with the ground opening up before his eyes for more than six consecutive years, decided to do something almost unheard of in his time: instead of simply praying or seeking religious explanations for the disaster, he sat down to observe, measure and describe, with a precision that still surprises us today.
Six years of fire
What followed was one of the longest and most devastating eruptions in modern European volcanic history. Between 1730 and 1736, the ground on Lanzarote opened again and again, with pauses and renewed activity, burying more than twenty villages under lava and destroying the island’s most fertile farmland. Curbelo documented every new fissure, every new volcanic cone, every time the phenomenon seemed to die down only to return weeks later with greater force. In one passage he recounts how a lava flow destroyed the chapel of San Juan Bautista, near Yaiza, and how the livestock in the surrounding area suffocated in the toxic vapours spreading through the air.[1]
A chronicle, not a prayer
What makes Curbelo’s diary special is not only its value as a first-hand testimony, but its approach. At a time when natural phenomena on this scale were almost always interpreted as divine punishment, the parish priest of Yaiza chose a different perspective: to observe before judging, to describe before interpreting. That is why it is considered today one of the earliest scientific chronicles of a volcanic eruption in European history — written, paradoxically, not by a naturalist, but by a churchman armed only with paper, a quill and a patience that is hard to imagine.
What remains
The original text was lost, and what has reached us consists of later copies and translations, not always faithful to one another — something that has led, over the centuries, to small discrepancies in the details. But the core of the account remains intact, and today excerpts are displayed in the visitor centre of Timanfaya National Park, while in Yaiza, his village, he is remembered as a founding figure of the island’s identity.
The curious thing is that, without knowing it, Curbelo left behind more than a chronicle of catastrophe: he left the birth certificate of a landscape. The Timanfaya tourists photograph today, that sea of black lava which César Manrique would turn into artistic raw material two centuries later, was born precisely in the pages a village priest wrote while everything around him burned.