Economy and Society of Lanzarote

For centuries, Lanzarote's society lived on the edge of subsistence. Traditional agriculture and livestock farming struggled to develop in an environment of recurring droughts, but the people were very industrious: they tilled the land despite the aridity and, with great effort, obtained some harvest for their daily sustenance. Small livestock — goats, sheep and pigs — together with donkeys and camels, were the main domestic species present in the villages, and fishing and shellfish gathering were also an important sector of employment for the population. Crises alternated with more productive years of good harvests, in a cycle that shaped the island mentality.

Successive export cycles were superimposed on that subsistence base. The first was that of orchil, the dye lichen whose trade fell under seigneurial monopoly: the lords of the island controlled export activity, also collecting a fifth of every cargo. At the end of the eighteenth century came the boom of barilla, a plant whose ashes yielded soda for European industries: notarial records document shipments from Lanzarote to Lisbon in 1798 and to England in 1810, and the incipient trade attracted the leading merchants, in open conflict with the local oligarchy that monopolised the business. The depreciation of barilla in foreign markets, towards the mid-nineteenth century, only aggravated the ills of a fragile economy.

The baton passed to cochineal, the parasitic insect of the prickly pear from which clothing dyes were extracted, cultivated above all in the second half of the nineteenth century, alongside the productive activity of salt and the salt pans. The expansion of cereal and vine cultivation, through the strenuous labour of the island's peasantry using techniques adapted to the environment — harvesting on jable sands and on areas covered by ash — proved fundamental for subsistence and for export to other islands. Despite the later decline of the dye industry, the island still preserves large areas devoted to prickly pears, as in Guatiza.

The cochineal boom also drove a decisive political and urban transformation: the rise of Arrecife's fishing and commercial port fostered the city's progress, which in 1852 took the capital status from the Real Villa de Teguise and positioned itself as the gateway for inhabitants, visitors and goods. Signs of modernisation followed one another: in 1884 the telegraph was installed by cable, in 1886 the Dolores hospital was inaugurated in Arrecife, and in 1897 the telephone line between Arrecife and Haría was laid, extended in successive years until it connected all the inland villages.

The sea sustained another essential part of the economy. The salt pans arose from the need to keep fish fresh before freezers existed, and produced in Lanzarote an architectural typology of its own and of great value, as can be seen in the Janubio salt pans; mills, fish-boiling houses and water channels completed that productive heritage, today largely in disuse. Fishing in turn fed an industry of fish canning and boat repair linked to the port of Arrecife, whose dynamism underpinned the prosperity of the new capital.

But Lanzarote's social history is crossed by calamities. The minutes of the Teguise council record plagues of locusts and cicadas, epidemics and years in which scarce rainfall left the maretas without water and the shops without bread, driving up the price of meagre foodstuffs. The crisis of 1877-1878 was of such magnitude that ships arrived loaded with water, thousands of people emigrated — as the traveller Olivia Stone recorded, out of sheer hunger and thirst — and economic contributions came from other towns in the islands, from mainland Spain and even from America. The diaspora, mostly male though also of entire families, left many households without men, and women had to face the problems of subsistence alone; bad weather, poor harvests and hunger drove the population time and again to emigrate to Gran Canaria and to America.

From that agriculture of adaptation survives its most celebrated fruit: wine. In La Geria, farmers dug hollows in the picón down to the fertile substrate, planted vines protected by semicircular dry-stone walls and turned volcanic ash into a productive resource. Malvasía ranks among the most identity-defining products of Lanzarote's gastronomy, and wineries such as El Grifo, La Geria, Rubicón, La Florida and Martinón keep alive a unique viticulture, whose landscape is protected.

The great contemporary turn came with tourism. In 1968 the island's airport opened to international charter flights, and César Manrique, who had returned definitively to the island in 1966, promoted a model of territorial intervention in a key of sustainability: he linked the creation of attractive elements for visitors with landscape conservation, materialised in the seven Centres of Art, Culture and Tourism of the Cabildo — from the Cueva de los Verdes and the Jameos del Agua to the Mirador del Río, the El Diablo restaurant in Timanfaya, the Casa-Museo del Campesino, the MIAC and the Cactus Garden — and insisted, for fear of uncontrolled speculation, on creating rules to regulate urban growth. That philosophy received its definitive endorsement with the declaration of Lanzarote as a Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO in 1993, a year after the artist's death.

Today's society, with some 157,000 inhabitants largely concentrated in Arrecife and its surroundings, lives from a service sector that receives millions of tourists a year and places Lanzarote among the most visited islands in the Canaries. A carrying-capacity study commissioned by the Cabildo concluded that the island must be considered a saturated tourist zone, with the most strained areas between Arrecife and Tías — whose enclave of Puerto del Carmen concentrates almost 40,000 bed places —, the south of Yaiza, the north and south of Teguise and the southern coast of Haría. The primary sectors have faded to a minimal expression, and proposals for the future involve reactivating agriculture, livestock farming and fishing, boosting canning, wine and ship repair, and committing to clean energy and higher-quality tourism.