History of Lanzarote

Before the arrival of Europeans, Lanzarote was inhabited by the Majos, indigenous people of North African origin linked to the Berber or Amazigh world. The sites of El Bebedero, Zonzamas and the Cueva de los Majos attest to an extremely ancient occupation, with radiocarbon dates pushing settlement back several centuries before the Common Era. These communities combined cave dwellings and stone buildings with intensive use of the arid environment.

The Majo economy was based on herding goats and sheep, supplemented by pig rearing, rain-fed barley cultivation, coastal fishing and shellfish gathering. The chroniclers of the Bethencourt conquest describe a landscape of scattered villages, stone houses and inhabited caves, where gofio, made from toasted grain, was a staple food. Footwear made of goat hide, called majos, eventually gave the island's inhabitants their name.

In 1402 Jean de Bethencourt's expedition landed on Lanzarote and subdued the island more easily than it did Fuerteventura. The Norman conqueror placed himself under the suzerainty of the Crown of Castile, legitimising the European presence with the support of the Seville bourgeoisie. After the conquest Betancuria was founded, and in 1405 it received a statue of the Virgin brought by Bethencourt himself on his return from Normandy. The seigneurial regime was established early on, and the exploitation of orchanilla and other natural riches went hand in hand with the enslavement of much of the indigenous population.

Lanzarote's proximity to the African coast made the island a habitual target for corsairs and Barbary pirates from the 16th century onwards. In 1539 Berbers burned the church at Betancuria, an episode in which the image of the Virgen de la Peña was hidden to save it from desecration. The scourge continued for decades: in 1618 a Turkish invasion razed the Villa de Teguise, the island's capital, destroyed buildings and notarial archives, and carried off some nine hundred inhabitants, men and women, as captives. Fortresses such as the castle of Guanapay and the defences of Arrecife were built in response to these threats.

Among the most devastating assaults was that of late July 1586, when the Algerian corsair Morato Arráez landed with a thousand men and attacked the Villa de Teguise. In the face of such raids the islanders took refuge in the Cueva de los Verdes, a volcanic tube with a secret entrance; during the invasion of 1618, however, the hideout was betrayed — tradition points to the notary Francisco Amado or to the guardians of the entrance — and its occupants were taken captive.

In 1730 one of the most important volcanic eruptions in Canary Islands historical times began. For six years, until 1736, activity at the Timanfaya complex opened more than a hundred craters, covered some two hundred square kilometres of the island with pyroclasts and lava, and buried villages and some of Lanzarote's most fertile farmland. The volume of ejected material has been estimated at around five cubic kilometres, making this eruption the largest by volume and duration recorded in the Canaries in historical times.

The devastation left behind the badlands of the Montañas del Fuego, today Timanfaya National Park, but also spurred a remarkable agricultural adaptation. Farmers developed enarenados, using the layer of picón to retain moisture and regulate soil temperature, and replanted vines in La Geria on the volcanic ash. The island's last eruption took place in 1824, when the Volcán de Tinguatón in the municipality of Tinajo became active.

The 18th century closed with a singular popular protest: the Pobrera uprising of 1789. A band of some eighty men, come from places as distant as Los Valles and Soo, marched by night to Conil to demand that Captain Juan Creagh, called 'Father of the Pobrera' for his fair justice, remain at the head of the island's government of arms. The rioters forced the notary Antonio Cuevas Zaldívar to draw up a record of the petition in the name of 'the Island and its Pobrera' and dispersed peacefully; Creagh ended up a prisoner in the castle of Paso Alto.

For centuries the island capital was the Villa de Teguise, founded inland as a refuge from corsair attacks and seat of seigneurial power. The rise of the port of Arrecife, first as a trade centre for barilla and later as a hub for fishing and communications, gradually shifted the economic axis towards the coast. In 1852 the capital was definitively transferred to Arrecife, reflecting the sea's predominance over inland agriculture.

In the 20th century Lanzarote remained a subsistence island, reliant on artisanal fishing, rain-fed farming and a fragile economy. From the 1950s the Island Council, the weekly Antena and the Lanzarote-born artist César Manrique promoted a different model of tourism development. Manrique, during his stay in New York in the mid-1960s, conceived the Art, Culture and Tourism Centres as a way to turn the volcanic landscape into an economic engine without sacrificing the natural heritage.

On his return to the island in 1966, Manrique realised six of the seven tourist centres: the International Museum of Contemporary Art at Castillo de San José, the Jameos del Agua, the Cueva de los Verdes, the Mirador del Río, the El Diablo restaurant in the Montañas del Fuego, the Casa-Museo del Campesino and the Jardín de Cactus. His proposal united art, architecture and territory, defended Lanzarote's popular architecture and laid the foundations for sustainable tourism that in 1993 earned the island UNESCO Biosphere Reserve status, one year after the artist's death.