Lanzarote

Between 1730 and 1736, more than thirty eruptive vents permanently reshaped west-central Lanzarote. The result is the Fire Mountains of Timanfaya National Park: a terrain of lava flows, cones and badlands with almost no visible vegetation, where geothermal heat sits so close to the surface that a handful of dry brushwood ignites just centimetres underground.

La Geria shows how farming turned catastrophe into resource. Growers dug thousands of conical hollows into the layer of picón — volcanic lapilli — and sheltered each vine behind a semicircular dry-stone wall. The ash traps night-time dew and releases moisture to the roots, allowing vineyards to thrive with almost no rainfall. The resulting landscape has no equivalent anywhere in the world.

Beneath the north of the island runs one of the longest volcanic tubes on the planet, formed by the eruption of the La Corona volcano thousands of years ago. Cueva de los Verdes and Jameos del Agua occupy stretches of that conduit, home to the jameíto, a blind albino crab under a centimetre long that exists nowhere else.

The whole island was declared a Biosphere Reserve in 1993, a recognition covering both its natural values and the model of integration between architecture and landscape championed by César Manrique. To the north, the Chinijo Archipelago completes the picture with cliffs rising over four hundred metres and one of the largest marine reserves in Europe.

The town of Teguise was the capital of Lanzarote until 1852 and, because of its inland position, a recurring target of the Berber and corsair raids that battered the island through the 16th and 17th centuries. Those episodes left behind Santa Bárbara Castle, perched in the crater of the Guanapay volcano, and place names such as the Alley of Blood. Its old town still holds convents, chapels and manor houses around the church of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe.

Taro de Tahíche is the work that best captures César Manrique's thinking. Built in 1968 on a lava flow from the 18th-century eruptions, it uses five natural volcanic bubbles as underground rooms linked by tunnels. Since 1992 it has housed the foundation bearing his name, which holds his archive and his collection of contemporary art.

Yaiza has repeatedly been recognised for preserving its vernacular architecture: single-storey whitewashed houses, joinery painted green or blue, enclosed courtyards and a complete absence of anything that breaks the scale of the whole. That model, later extended across the island through planning rules, is now one of Lanzarote's most recognisable traits.

Manrique's imprint continues at Jameos del Agua, Mirador del Río, the Cactus Garden and the Monument to the Peasant — interventions that turned geological features into public spaces without resorting to materials foreign to the place. To these can be added the International Museum of Contemporary Art at San José Castle in Arrecife, and the El Patio Agricultural Museum, which documents rural life before tourism.