On the Spanish Island of Lanzarote, High Design and Natural Wine Pair Nicely

15.11.2024 - 20:09 / cntraveler.com

Even six or seven years ago, the whispers about Lanzarote still came with an element of implied surprise. “It's actually really cool,” I remember a photographer friend telling me before I went with my partner in 2018. We ended up staying among the palms and black-ash vineyards at Finca Malvasia, part of the first generation of cool boutique hotels, and falling for the island's big skies, duotone volcanic landscapes, and singular brand of nature-facing modernism.

The “Lanza-grotty” epithet often used in Europe has always been unfair. Away from a few easily avoidable purpose-built coastal resorts, Lanzarote's quiet, unhurried interior is, in some ways, the Canaries' smaller, sunnier answer to Iceland. While wild geology created the hundreds of volcanic cones that dot the landscape, so much of Lanzarote's unique style reflects the influence of César Manrique, the designer, artist, and planner who died in 1992 after having effectively art-directed and color-coordinated the whole island. Manrique is the reason that just about every building is painted in white, often accented with cactus greens, obsidian blacks, and pops of aquamarine. He campaigned to ban billboards and high-rises, decorated roundabouts with kinetic wind toys, and established an enduring culture of building sympathetically with and into the landscape.

The interior of one of designer César Manrique’s island homes, now part of the César Manrique Foundation

A wind sculpture by César Manrique at the Foundation

When we went back to the island this past spring, we were still struck by that jaw-dropping, head-clearing sense of perspective: the slow pace, the languid driving, and the minimal visual noise. Prices remain reasonable, and it's still possible to snag the best seats at most seafront restaurants as a walk-in, though a certain type of Leica-toting Spanish visitor is more often in evidence. At the glassy, avant-garde Buenavista Lanzarote, an ecolodge that feels like a location for a fashion shoot amid the black volcanic landscape, regulars include the actor Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, who was staying while we were there, and the Barcelona-based tastemaker Nuria Val, founder of the skin-care brand Rowse, who comes with her photographer partner, Coke Bartrina, and their daughter. In the surf town of Caleta de Famara, with its long beach beneath an epic ridge, the model Jon Kortajarena rents out his angular villa Casa Sua, which has a Case Study House aesthetic that feels appropriate when you learn that Kortajarena played the love interest in Tom Ford's A Single Man.

There's also a palpable new seam of imaginativeness among residents. As Buenavista owner Gonzalo Bethencourt puts it, “The island has finally stepped out of Manrique's shadow and