Lanzarote is the island where the ground is youngest. Between 1730 and 1736 the earth opened along a line across the centre of the island and kept erupting for six years, burying about a quarter of the surface and wiping out the most fertile farmland. The last eruption was in 1824. Everything that makes the island worth the trip, the black fields, the vines in hollows, the caves you can walk into, comes from that.
This guide is what we would tell someone landing at Arrecife with three or four days. To go from the plan to something bookable, there are the excursions in Lanzarote.
Timanfaya: the volcanic landscape, and how you are allowed to see it
Timanfaya National Park covers the heart of the 1730s lava field, and the first thing to know is that you cannot wander it. The park is protected to the point that free walking is not allowed: you park at El Islote de Hilario and see the interior from a coach on the Ruta de los Volcanes, a fourteen-kilometre circuit through the craters with commentary. It lasts around forty minutes and it is the only way in for most visitors.
At the visitor point the staff run the geothermal demonstrations, and they are not a trick: a few metres down the rock still sits at around 600 degrees. They drop gorse into a hole and it catches fire on its own; they pour water into a borehole and it comes back as a jet of steam. Next to it, the El Diablo restaurant grills over a pit fed by that same heat, with no fuel of any kind.
Go early. The car park fills by mid-morning and the queue for the coach is the bottleneck of the whole visit. The alternatives are a guided Timanfaya tour that handles the timing for you, or arriving at opening.
Lanzarote: full-day island bus tour with Timanfaya and wine tasting
Lanzarote Bus Tour: discover Jameos del Agua, Cueva de los Verdes, and more This Lanzarote bus tour brings together the island's main sights in a single day, with an official guide in English. The route runs from the volcanic landscapes of Timanfaya National Park...
- Lanzarote
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Cueva de los Verdes and Jameos del Agua: the same tube, two very different visits
Both sit inside a single lava tube, more than six kilometres long, left by the Monte Corona volcano thousands of years before the 1730s eruptions. Lava drained away under a crust that had already hardened, and the empty channel stayed.
Cueva de los Verdes is the raw half. It is visited on a guided walk of about fifty minutes through the galleries, with lighting that picks out the colours in the rock. It also has a history that is not decoration: for centuries the islanders hid in here from Berber pirate raids, and the guides show you why the tunnel is so hard to attack. There is one moment near the end that everyone remembers and that nobody should be told about in advance.
Jameos del Agua is the other half, and it is César Manrique’s best-known work. A jameo is a stretch where the roof of the tube collapsed, so you get an open-air crater with the cave running out of both sides. Manrique turned it into a garden, a pool and an auditorium with the acoustics of the rock itself. In the salt lake at the bottom lives the reason the site is protected: Munidopsis polymorpha, a blind albino crab about a centimetre long that exists here and nowhere else on the planet. Do not throw coins in, the metal poisons them.
Lanzarote: Jameos del Agua, Timanfaya and views of La Graciosa
Explore Lanzarote on a bus tour with views of La Graciosa Enjoy a bus tour in Lanzarote that will take you through some of the island's most stunning landscapes, including the incredible views of La Graciosa from the Famara cliff. This tour also includes...
- Haría
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César Manrique, and why the island looks the way it does
You cannot spend three days here without meeting his name, and it is worth understanding what he actually did. Manrique came back to Lanzarote from New York in 1966, at the exact moment the Canaries were being built over, and he persuaded the island authorities to hold a line: no buildings above two storeys outside Arrecife, white walls, no roadside billboards, no high-rise resorts. That is why Lanzarote looks nothing like the coasts of the other islands, and it is a policy decision, not luck.
The Fundación César Manrique occupies the house he built for himself at Taro de Tahíche. The lower floor is a set of five volcanic bubbles left by the lava of the 1730s, linked by tunnels and turned into rooms, with fig trees growing up through the openings. It is the clearest example of what he was arguing for, and it takes about an hour and a half.
His other pieces are scattered across the island and most double as viewpoints: the Mirador del Río in the far north, cut into a cliff 475 metres above the strait, with La Graciosa laid out below; the Jardín de Cactus in Guatiza, built in an old quarry with around 4,500 plants; and the Monumento al Campesino in the middle of the island.
Lanzarote: César Manrique Foundation and Teguise market with pickup
Tickets to César Manrique Foundation and Teguise Market Discover the art and culture of Lanzarote with tickets to César Manrique Foundation and a visit to Teguise Market Enjoy an amazing excursion that includes tickets to the César Manrique Foundation and a guided visit to...
- Lanzarote
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The beaches, and which one is for what
- Papagayo, in the far south, inside the Los Ajaches natural monument: a string of sheltered coves with pale sand and clear, still water. Access is by an unsurfaced track with a small charge per car, and there is almost nothing there in the way of services, so take water and something for shade. It is the calmest swimming on the island.
- Famara, in the north-west, is six kilometres of open sand under a wall of cliffs, and it is the opposite proposition. The wind and the shore break make it one of the best surf and kitesurf spots in Europe and a poor place to swim: the currents here are serious and there is no lifeguard along most of it. Go for the walk, the sunset and the view across to La Graciosa.
- Playa Blanca and Puerto del Carmen hold the serviced town beaches, with promenades, sunbeds and everything within walking distance. Useful rather than spectacular.
- El Golfo is not a beach to swim at, but the green lagoon beside it, sitting in a half-eroded crater with black sand between it and the sea, is one of the images people come for. Ten minutes and you have seen it.
La Graciosa: the day trip that is worth a whole day
La Graciosa was officially recognised as the eighth Canary Island in 2018, which made it the smallest inhabited one in the archipelago. The ferry crosses from Órzola in about twenty-five minutes and runs several times a day.
What you find is a village, Caleta de Sebo, and no tarmac anywhere: the streets are sand and you move around on foot, by bicycle or in the four-wheel-drive taxis that run to the beaches. Playa de las Conchas, on the north coast, is the one people photograph, and it is also the one where you should not swim, because the currents there are strong. Playa Francesa and La Cocina, on the sheltered side, are the ones for a swim.
Take food and water with you; the village has a handful of places and they fill up. And check the return times before you leave the port, because the last ferry is earlier than most people assume.
Teguise on a Sunday, and the vines of La Geria
Teguise was the capital of Lanzarote until 1852 and still looks it: a grid of white streets around a square, with a couple of palaces and the old Santa Bárbara castle on the volcano above the town. On Sundays it holds the island’s market, from around nine to two, and half of Lanzarote turns up. Come early or accept the parking. If you want the town without the crowd, any other day of the week it is almost empty.
La Geria, on the road between Uga and Masdache, is the strangest farmland in Europe and it is worth stopping to understand rather than just photographing. After the eruptions the fields were buried under a layer of volcanic ash. Instead of clearing it, the islanders dug conical hollows down to the old soil, planted a single vine in each and built a semicircular dry-stone wall, a zoco, on the windward side. The ash traps night moisture and releases it to the roots, and the wall takes the trade wind. One vine per hollow, thousands of hollows across the valley. The grape is mostly malvasía volcánica, and several bodegas along the road open for tastings.
Getting around, and how many days
- Car. Effectively necessary. The island is around sixty kilometres north to south and the bus network covers the towns, not Timanfaya, La Geria or the Papagayo track.
- Where to stay. Puerto del Carmen and Playa Blanca in the south for beaches and services, Costa Teguise on the east for shorter runs to the north, Arrecife if you want the working town rather than the resort.
- Two days. One for Timanfaya and La Geria, one for the north with Cueva de los Verdes, Jameos del Agua and Mirador del Río.
- Four days. Add La Graciosa and an afternoon at Papagayo, and fit the Sunday market in if the dates work.
- A week. Add Famara, the Jardín de Cactus, a bodega visit with lunch and one day with nothing planned.
The weather is not a reason to choose dates: the coast sits between 19 and 27 degrees all year. What changes is the wind, which is constant and stronger from June to September. It makes the heat comfortable and the north coast rough.
One practical last thing: the island tourist board publishes a free map at turismolanzarote.com, which is more useful offline than it sounds when the signal drops in the middle of the lava fields.
All the excursions in Lanzarote
If you would rather see the options together and filter by area or by type of outing, they are in excursions in Lanzarote, with their own pages for Timanfaya and Teguise, the Sunday market and the César Manrique Foundation.
