The Noise on the Walls: Urban Static

64 images of graffiti and murals captured by 

Travelmarx over the years.

Walking around Bergamo, we often pass the same walls over and over: stone, stucco, concrete, each carrying the palimpsest of tags, scrawls, throw-ups, and the occasional ambitious mural. Most of it we don’t like. Some of it is clever. Much of it feels like a form of urban abrasion. But whether we admire it, tolerate it, or quietly curse it, we can’t not see it.

Graffiti is visual noise. It fills the eye the way unwanted sound fills the ear—insistent, uninvited, and undeniably present. And like noise, graffiti has a way of revealing a city’s and culture's restlessness.

Noise is a theme we’ve returned to before, in posts as different as our musing on Schopenhauer’s irritation with clatter (Schopenhauer, On Noise), our exploration of disruption across centuries (Noise and Nuisance; Bronzino to Babbage), and a more personal reflection on how sound becomes a kind of knowing (You Know It When You Hear It). Graffiti simply completes the metaphor. If noise is the soundtrack of a city that refuses to be orderly, graffiti is the handwriting of that refusal.

The Clean Surface Myth

Cities like the idea of cleanliness—clean streets, clean façades, clean narratives about who belongs and who gets to speak. You see this in the small brigade of city workers who occasionally repaint a tagged wall. The smooth, monochrome patch lasts days, maybe hours, until someone adds their mark. The next repaint will come when it comes. Meanwhile, the cycle—paint, tag, paint, tag—becomes its own quiet commentary.

Public space isn’t neutral, no matter how clean it looks. Corporate logos, government messages, shop signage, and advertising already occupy most of what we see. Graffiti just breaks the illusion that these sanctioned voices are the natural state of things. It interrupts, inserts, and insists.

The Easy Explanation We Don’t Fully Buy

There’s a standard explanation for graffiti: it’s the voice of the marginalized, the unsanctioned speech of those without access to the official channels. And yes, sometimes that is true. But walking around Bergamo, this neat narrative never quite matches what’s on the walls.

Most of what we see doesn’t feel like political expression or a plea to be acknowledged. It feels more like a motorbike revving under your window at midnight—an assertion of presence, not a manifesto.

And anyway, if feeling unheard automatically produced graffiti, wouldn’t we all be out tagging? We’re not. When we feel frustrated or overlooked—or simply full of opinions—we take the official routes: voting, emailing the comune, participating in neighborhood committees, or writing blog posts that attempt (sometimes unsuccessfully) to make sense of it all. These are our sanctioned modes of expression. Slow, structured, polite.

No one’s spray-painting È vietato ignorare questo blog post on a retaining wall.

So maybe the graffiti–oppression narrative is too tidy. Perhaps graffiti isn’t always a voice from the margins, but a voice that simply refuses to wait. Graffiti collapses time: it speaks now. Civic channels take their time: they speak eventually, after stamps and signatures and agenda items.

The discomfort we feel may not be moral at all—it may be temporal. Graffiti is impatient; we are happy to be patient.

Disorder as Ritual

Graffiti fits neatly into the anthropological idea of ritual inversion—those moments when rules are gleefully broken to reveal how fragile the rules really are. Carnival does this with masks and parody; graffiti does it with paint.

The mess is not a side effect. It is the gesture.

A tagged wall today may be a neat monochrome surface tomorrow, and then a clean canvas again by the end of the week. The city is always smoothing things over; writers are always filling them back up. Impermanence becomes the rhythm.

Texture Over Cleanliness

One idea we keep circling back to is how differently we respond to images of people on walls. We realize we’re more susceptible to graffiti that depicts human forms, especially faces—whether it’s part of a formal mural or something more spontaneous, a piece of graffiti that has drifted into mural territory. The line between the two is often blurry anyway.

So before we get too far, it’s worth admitting that not all wall markings land the same way. Murals—commissioned or not—tend to feel intentional, composed, legible. Faces, in particular, can stop us in our tracks: eyes gazing down, features rendered with surprising tenderness or defiance. These images show up in our photos far more often than scribbles or territorial tagging. They evoke something: recognition, curiosity, maybe even connection.

But are they really different? Or are we just more comfortable with certain forms of visual interruption than others?

Even the most beautiful mural is still an intervention on a wall that wasn’t blank by accident. It claims space just as tagging does. The difference may lie less in the act than in our willingness to decode the result. A portrait offers us an entry point—a face is a language we understand instinctively—while a tag demands fluency in a code we don’t speak.

Perhaps murals and graffiti are not opposing categories but points on the same continuum of urban expression, one simply easier for us to welcome. Beauty can be a softening agent. It can make us forget that the gesture underneath—the insistence on being seen—belongs to the same family as the scribbles we tend to dismiss.

One of the quiet surprises of travel is realizing how much a city’s character comes from the things you didn’t go there to see. London’s layers, Lisbon’s flourishes, and Reykjavík’s bursts of color and whimsy all become part of a place’s mental map.

When we visited Reykjavík years ago, the street art was impossible to ignore—clever, bold, often beautiful, and woven into the city’s fabric. It didn’t feel like vandalism or rebellion; it felt like the city making itself visible in its own energetic way. Not unlike noise, which you never plan for but remember anyway.

Clean walls can make a place feel eerily blank, as if life had been pressed flat. Graffiti—even when messy—adds texture. Yes, some texture is good, right?

What Graffiti May Actually Be Saying

Walking past tagged walls the other day on our way to the hospital, we wondered: what exactly is the message here? Are we meant to decode it? Is there anything to decode? Maybe the message is simply the mark itself—a claim, a moment of visibility, a quick refusal to be quiet.

Or maybe the message is aimed at other writers, not at us at all. The city becomes, in effect, someone else’s chat thread—one we’re reading without fully understanding the references.

Closing Reflection

Graffiti isn’t easy to like, and it’s probably not meant to be. It unsettles the visual field the way noise unsettles silence. But both remind us that cities are not curated exhibits; they are lived-in, contested, slightly unruly things.

Some people speak through walls; we speak through notes, photos, and posts. All of it is a kind of noise—some sprayed, some typed—each insisting on being noticed in its own way.

Maybe what troubles us most is not that graffiti is there, but that we’re not always sure what it’s asking us to notice. And maybe that uncertainty is part of what makes a city feel alive.

Living the Dream (Beta)

 

Living the Dream™ app inputs (left) and output (right). The app can never be built.

A friend said to us once, "You two are living the dream!" when she found out we were going to live in Italy. It was meant kindly, and we took it that way. Still, the phrase gave us pause. Whose dream exactly? And what did we do to enable this consciously or unconsciously? 

It’s a curious statement, because it tells us as much about the person who says it as it does about our lives here. Their imagined Italy streams in (olive trees, late-afternoon glow, maybe a nonna with an apron and wooden spoon), while our actual Italy bustles around us: conversations, waiting in line at the post office, a walk to a Sunday dinner at a trattoria, and the day-to-day texture that never shows up on postcards.

None of this is bad. It’s just more complicated than the dream phrase suggests. And so, to understand this dreamy projection, we imagined building an app.

The App

We would call it Living the Dream™. The idea is that you open the app and dial in your ideal life in Italy as if tuning an old stereo: financial comfort, preferred location, weather, community, and expectations. A few simple questions, press “Generate Dream”, and eccola!

But what comes out of the app may surprise you.

Dream Inputs

Financial Situation
Settings:

• Comfortable enough to buy an aperitivo once a week.
• Rent is manageable.
• Own a crumbling-yet-charming palazzo.
• Able to renovate a medieval tower.

Impact: 3%. Turns out money helps, but only to a certain point.

Locale Selector
Settings:

• Hilltop village (but not the one with 1-euro houses).
• Periphery of a city with bars on lower windows.
• Urban palazzo with questionable plumbing.
• Near a strong Wi-Fi signal.
• Anywhere but where I am now.

Impact: 7%. After three weeks, any place reveals its traffic, noise, or neighbor who drills at 7 a.m.


Bureaucracy Tolerance
Settings:

• Scared of paper cuts.
• Forms induce hives.
• You queue with impatience.
• Zen monk of the queue.

Impact: highly erratic. Occasionally transcendental.


Community & Belonging
Settings:

• You know where the grocery store is.
• You know the name and birthday of the barista in the café you frequent.
• People beep and wave at you when you are walking on the street.
• You are invited to family functions.
• You find yourself showing up to funerals with hesitation.

Impact: 22%. A fact we’ve rediscovered many times and is often underestimated.


Expectations Knob
Settings:

• Instagram Dream
• Aspirational Mood Board
• Average Tuesday Realism

Impact: Unknown. Expectations are a setting that never stays put.


Weather Sentiment
Settings:

• You need to wear sunglasses every day.
• You want winter only long enough to justify a new coat.
• You function best with moody, overcast skies.
• You prefer weather that is not actively trying to prove a point.

Impact: 5%. Meteorology resists optimization. The weather doesn’t care about your settings.


Hidden Setting: Presence

Invisible to the user. Adjusted by sleep, good walks, friendships, and noticing small joys.

Impact: Consistently the greatest.

The Unexpected Output

After dialing your settings and pressing “Generate Dream”, you might anticipate a score of feasibility for your dream, the name of a town to start your dream, or something to get you going. But instead, the app – stubbornly or wisely – pauses for a moment and finally displays:

"You were living the dream last Sunday at 1:14 p.m.”

You scratch your head and realize you were out on a walk in the woods with a friend on a sunny winter day on your way to a trattoria for lunch.

No score. No city recommendation. Just a moment.

The app has decided that the dream is not settings. It’s an instance. A flash. Something lived but rarely labeled.

The app knows its limits. It can't manufacture:

• the warmth of stepping into a trattoria after a brisk walk,
• the familiarity of walking streets you now know by heart,
• the reinvigoration after a walk in the hills on a lazy afternoon,
• the café that suddenly feels like your café,
• the invitations to baptisms and the closures of funerals,
• the tiny rituals that are hard to explain but are felt,
• and yes even queuing for everything.

The app can only surface what is already there.

Whose Dream Is It, Really?

When someone says, "You’re living the dream," we hear it differently now. It’s not about perfection or escape. It’s about the very human instinct to imagine that somewhere else—or someone else—has cracked the code.

But our fictional app insists otherwise: There is no code to crack. Your dream isn’t built from optimized parameters. It’s assembled from moments you noticed. It's created in real time, without settings, and often without realizing you have created it until much later.

And that friend who first told us we were living the dream? We hear her differently now. She’s someone who has gone after and realized many of her own dreams—raising a family, buying houses with potential and turning them into beautiful homes, even moving to Palm Springs for a while before returning to Seattle. Maybe her words weren’t a projection at all, but encouragement from someone who recognizes a familiar arc in someone else’s story.

At the same time, Italians sometimes look at us with disbelief. Why would you choose to live here they ask. Their dreams often point westward, toward the United States; ours pointed eastward, toward Italy. It’s a reminder that dreams are always relative, shaped by circumstances, culture, history, and whatever context we happen to be standing in.

An app could never truly measure or output a dream. Our app won’t ever have an official release version.

Becoming a Little Less Grinchy: Rethinking Ritual Inversions

I’ve always been a little allergic to Christmas cheer. The carols, the shopping frenzy, the forced smiles—they all felt hollow. But reading The Dawn of Everything (Graeber and Wengrow) nudged me into seeing things a little differently. What if the goodwill we show in December is not just sentimentality, but a faint echo of older, wilder traditions—moments when societies deliberately flipped their norms, from Saturnalia in Rome to the May Queen in medieval Europe? Suddenly, even the rituals that are easily dismissed look like fragments of something deeper. The past moments were when hierarchies inverted, roles reversed, generosity flowed freely. These weren’t just parties; they were experimenting in living otherwise.

We also used to look at events like Burning Man, Pride parades, or Carnival with a skeptical eye. They seemed indulgent, chaotic, or simply frivolous. The The Dawn of Everything shifted our perspective, again. Seen in this light, maybe modern festivals are not trivial distractions. They are cultural descendants of those inversion rituals. Pride reclaims stigma as a celebration. Burning Man suspends the logic of money in favor of gifting. Carnival masks dissolve everyday boundaries. Each creates a temporary world where norms are questioned, and alternatives are enacted.

We realized that our own negative view was blocking us from seeing another way to understand these events. These events are not just spectacles; they are reminders that society is not fixed, that we can imagine and embody different arrangements, even if only for a few days.

Perhaps the real lesson is that inversion festivals, ancient or modern, are less about escape than about memory: they keep alive the possibility that things could be otherwise. 

Color me a little less green this Christmas.

Lanzarote: Notes from a Brief Botanical Infatuation

Two Worlds, Two Climates ~ Group 1: Plants Seen Out and About ~ 

Group 2: Patterns from the Jardín de Cactus ~ Why These Plants Stayed with Us

Left: Plants we saw out and about on Lanzarote.

Right: Plants we saw in the Jardín de Cactus.

We can’t help it. Plants call to us to have their photos taken. You could call it travel-induced plant euphoria. I guess changing your biome wakes up one’s senses. And Lanzarote certainly counts as a biome change. A big one.

The last time we felt this moved by plants was in Japan in May 2025. We wrote about those in Temples and Shrines, Gardens and Connection to Nature in Japan.

A few days on this volcanic island and suddenly we had enough plant photos to justify at least one composite image of plants. But then we stepped foot in the beautiful Jardín de Cactus | CACT Lanzarote where we proceeded to snap hundreds of more photos. The best of the cactus garden photos are in the second composite image.

Two Worlds, Two Climates

For the climate nerds (we see you, because we are you):

• Lanzarote → BWh hot desert climate + dry Macaronesian ecoregion
• Bergamo → Cfa humid subtropical climate + temperate mixed forest ecoregion

We had to look up Macaronesia. Didn’t even know the term. The Canary Islands, Madeira, Azores, and Cape Verde are all part of this biogeographical region. Naturally, our first reaction seeing the word Macaronesian was to confuse it with the country Micronesia. How ignorant we are in geography! But now we’re obsessed, because this little chain of islands out in the Atlantic is home to plants you simply don’t see elsewhere.

While standing on Lanzarote, you can almost feel the ecological isolation. The island is small — only about 50 km by 20 km — and dry. Very dry. Depending on where you are, annual rainfall averages somewhere around 100–200 mm a year. Bergamo gets five to six times that without even trying. No wonder Lanzarote plants have attitude.

The island of Lanzarote doesn’t have the kind of tall peaks—think 1500 meters and above—that force moist trade-wind air upward to form clouds and rain. Without that orographic lift, most of the moisture simply passes by, leaving Lanzarote in its famously dry state while neighboring Canary Islands with higher mountains capture far more precipitation. For more about Lanzarote, see Lanzarote - In the Layers.

Group 1: Plants Seen Out and About

In this category, we include plants you can easily see in gardens, along roadsides, and even on beaches.

Phoenix canariensis

The Canary Island date palm. Native, iconic, and everywhere — and if you’re from a place where palms are landscaping luxuries, seeing them casually lining roads feels like cheating.

Euphorbiaceae Running the Show

By far, the family we saw the most — both in the wild and later in the cactus garden — was Euphorbiaceae. Lanzarote seems determined to make sure you notice this. Two members of this family:

• Tabaiba dulce (Euphorbia balsamifera) The official plant symbol of Lanzarote. It’s an endemic shrub perfectly suited to the island’s dry slopes and lava fields. Knobby looking, architectural, and somehow both tough and delicate. A sort of botanical embodiment of the island itself.
• Poinsettias (Euphorbia pulcherrima) It amazes us to see these grown outside while I struggle to keep ours alive through January. Some people vacation to relax; we vacation to be humbled by horticulture.

When "Weeds" Go International

Some plants we saw are not native at all — but show up so often that you start thinking they belong there.

• Rumex lunaria (family Polygonaceae) A known invasive on Lanzarote — though the story is more complicated. Recent genetic work shows that most individuals on the island descend from plants originating on El Hierro, suggesting a human‑mediated introduction rather than natural dispersion (2023 phylogeographic study). Local oral history claims it was brought to northern Lanzarote in the early 20th century, possibly the 1930s, as a drought‑tolerant forage plant (Bernardos et al.). Botanists didn’t formally record the species on Lanzarote until 1970 (Per Sunding) (research summary), but by the 1980s it was already spreading across disturbed volcanic slopes, including inside Timanfaya. Today it is often treated as a “translocated native” — a plant native to the Canary Islands but introduced to this particular island by people, now behaving invasively in fragile terrain.
• Nicotiana glauca (family Solanaceae) Tree tobacco — a plant we spotted in abandoned lots, roadside edges, and dry ravines. It isn’t native to the Canary Islands; N. glauca originates from South America. It was introduced globally in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, often as an ornamental shrub, and quickly naturalized in warm, arid climates where it thrives on disturbance. In the Canary Islands it is considered an alien, naturalized species, spreading easily through volcanic soils and human-altered landscapes (GBIF). Fast-growing and drought-tolerant, it has become a familiar presence on roadsides and in the forgotten corners of Lanzarote.

Lichens in a Desert?

Yep. Lanzarote has surprising lichen diversity. In Timanfaya we were especially struck by pale crusts and branching gray forms. One of the species associated with volcanic substrates in Macaronesian islands is Stereocaulon vesuvianum, a lichen well adapted to harsh, mineral-rich lava fields. It looks ghostly and delicate, yet survives where most plants never would.

The lichens are pioneers. They begin the long, slow process of turning rock into something resembling soil. By breaking down volcanic surfaces through chemical weathering, trapping dust, and building up tiny bits of organic matter, they quietly prepare the ground for whatever comes next.

They’re the first hint of what might someday become something lush. Not soon, not quickly, not on any human schedule — but lichens are the patient opening act that makes future plant life possible.

Names of plants in the composite image:

• Row 1
• Foliose form of lichen on lava perhaps Ramalina.
• [Amaranthaceae] Suadea vera
• [Anacardiaceae] Schinus molle
• [Apocynaceae] Stephanotis floribunda
• [Araucariaceae] Araucaria heterophylla
• Row 2
• [Arecaceae] Phoenix canariensis
• [Asparagaceae] Agave americana
• [Asparagaceae] Dracaena drago
• [Asteraceae] Launaea arborescens
• [Boraginaceae] Cordia sebestena
• Row 3
• [Crassulaceae] Sedum morganianum
• [Euphorbiaceae] Codiaeum variegatum
• [Euphorbiaceae] Euphorbia balsamifera
• [Euphorbiaceae] Euphorbia pulcherrima
• [Moraceae] Ficus macrophylla
• Row 4
• [Myrtaceae] Psidium sp.
• [Polygonaceae] Rumex lunaria
• [Solanaceae] Nicotiana glauca
• [Vitaceae] Vitis vinifera - Malvasia volcanica
• [Zygophyllaceae] Zygophyllum fontanessii

Group 2: Patterns from the Jardín de Cactus

The cactus garden is a lesson in geometry. It’s also a lesson in humility: you think you’re photographing a plant, but what you’re actually photographing is the pattern it creates. Spirals, ribs, shadows, and repeating forms. Barrel cacti arranged like green dominos. Opuntia pads making accidental abstract art. 
And everywhere, that stark contrast: bright green against black volcanic lapilli.

The garden is curated, sure, but still very much in conversation with the wild landscape around it. Stand in the right spot and you see a cactus rib echoing a terraced volcanic slope behind it. Or vice versa.

Why These Plants Stayed with Us

Lanzarote overwhelmed us with its scenery. After the initial wow moment(s), you start to slow pick out plants and understand their niche. Each plant showing you how life adapts to dryness, wind, and volcanic dust. And once you start noticing, you can’t stop. The layers of Lanzarote are discussed in the post, Lanzarote – In they Layers.

It’s a kind of travel shift: suddenly, we’re comparing our own region’s plants to those here, thinking about ecoregions and rainfall, and remembering that the planet arranges itself in patterns we barely pay attention to.

And maybe that’s the joy of travel: you leave home for a few days, you come back with too many plant photos and a renewed respect for humidity and horticulture.

If we ever get our poinsettia to survive winter in Bergamo, we’ll consider it a victory. But Lanzarote? Lanzarote doesn’t even break a sweat.

For more plant-related wanderings, see:

• Temples and Shrines, Gardens and Connection to Nature in Japan
• Sintra in Three Days - Plants and Patterns
• Selected Plants from Our Iceland Trip

Lanzarote - In the Layers

   
Left: Pit vineyards in La Geria, Lanzarote.
Center left: Mirador Near Ermita de Las Nieves.
Center right: Jardín de Cactus  | CACT Lanzarote.
Right: Four days in Lanzarote - points we touched.

What struck us first and most forcefully about Lanzarote was its volcanic landscape. The colors, the textures, the way the island seems built from both violence and patience. But once the initial awe settled, we began asking questions. Why is this like this? What are we looking at? How does anything grow here? We began sensing that understanding Lanzarote would require peeling back layers.

Our visit was about layers. Layers of literal volcanic material, lapilli and lava tubes underfoot. Layers of subsistence practices visible in walls, terraces, and pits. Layers of desalination breakthroughs that made life on an arid island not just possible but desirable. Layers of César Manrique’s guiding hand, still visible in curves, colors, and the notable absence of visual clutter. And layers of our own misplaced expectations as first-time visitors trying to read a place that doesn’t reveal itself quickly.

For several days we wandered, read, asked questions, misinterpreted, corrected our misinterpretations, and came away realizing that Lanzarote doesn’t reward the myth of the “unspoiled.” What it offers instead is something more interesting: a palimpsest. A landscape layered with interventions: volcanic, agricultural, architectural, and touristic. Layers that only makes sense once you stop trying to strip away the layers and instead learn to read them.

In the following section-layers, we call out things we wondered about and worked to reveal to ourselves and might interest others thinking about visiting Lanzarote. The layers don’t need to be read sequentially.

• First Peoples
• Water Changed Everything
• Manrique Everywhere
• Landscapes That Require Homework
• Fire and Ash — The Volcanic Layer
• Anthropologist Illusion
• Tourism
• Searching for the Unspoiled
• Nostalgia as a Travel Companion
• Reading the Layers
• P.S. Food Pics

For more on Lanzarote plants, see the post Lanzarote: Notes from a Brief Botanical Infatuation.

First Peoples

Before desalination, before tourism, before Manrique, the island’s earliest human story belonged to the Majos (often grouped under the broader Canary Islands term Guanche, though each island had distinct cultures). They lived with the island’s aridity long before outsiders imagined it as scenery. Their world was one of adaptation: seasonal settlements, grazing, foraging, and making do with what little the land and sea offered.

Then came the long centuries of interruption from Berber arrivals, European incursions, and repeated pirate raids. Teguise, the island’s former capital, still seems to carry that memory: narrow lanes angled defensively, churches fortified almost as much as adorned, and lookout points positioned less for views than for warning. Castillo de Santa Bárbara, perched above Teguise, was a great place for watching for pirates.

By the time the Spanish asserted full control in the 15th century, Lanzarote had already been shaped by centuries of contact, conflict, and negotiation. That’s the true first layer of Lanzarote: a place continually adapting to forces larger than itself, natural and human.

Water Changed Everything

Lanzarote’s modern story pivots on a quiet technological revolution. In 1964, the island installed what is often cited as the first seawater‑desalination plant in Europe (Lanzarote’s water history, La Voz de Lanzarote 60‑year report). By 1965, potable water flowed through the municipal network, a moment locals still describe as the beginning of “the modern island.”

Before that, life here was a choreography of drought, ingenuity, and scarcity. Rainfall was unreliable, wells brackish, cisterns precious. Villages planned their entire rhythms around water; families emigrated when the rain failed. When we read about this period and saw the faint lines of old gavias still trying to catch water. the island’s aridity began to feel less like scenery and more like a protagonist.

Desalination didn’t make Lanzarote green. The volcanic landscape remains as stark and beautiful as ever. What changed was the possibility of stable agriculture, of reliable water, of electricity linked to the plant, of tourism that wouldn’t collapse in the next drought. The island didn’t soften, but daily life became less precarious.

    

Photos from Jameos del Aqua: inside the lava tube and out, as well as in the museum.

Manrique Everywhere

Manrique’s name showed up long before we stepped foot on Lanzarote in guidebooks and web sites mentioning his name with the integration of art, ecology, and architecture. So, we had high expectations, and, in many ways, his work did not disappoint. But the lived version of this idea is subtler.

César Manrique (1919–1992) was a Lanzarote‑born artist, architect, and environmental visionary whose work reshaped the island’s identity. Trained as a painter, he returned to Lanzarote in the 1960s with the conviction that development and ecology could coexist, and he spent the next decades creating spaces that fused art, volcanic geology, and traditional architecture. Many of the island’s most iconic sites — Jameos del Agua, Mirador del Río, the Jardín de Cactus — exist because he championed a low‑impact, landscape‑first approach to tourism.

In Manrique’s Taro de Tahíche home (today the César Manrique Foundation), you realize he wasn’t trying to impose beauty on the island but coax it out of the lava. He insisted that tourism didn’t have to be overwriting; it could be revealing.

Manrique’s impact: whitewashed cubes, curves instead of corners, space left unfilled, and a ban on billboards (imagine that!). At the César Manrique Foundation, the “museum” begins not with a reception desk but by descending into a volcanic bubble.

And then the ironic layer of his story: even Manrique eventually fled the coastal tourism he helped shape, retreating from Tahíche to Haría (his birth town), in the hills. Perhaps not out of resignation, or maybe because he understood something essential about living with visitors: even sustainable tourism gets old.

His Haría house, where he lived for his last four years, feels like he left yesterday. He just left for a quick errand. If the Tahíche house shows Manrique the sculptor‑architect, volcanic and outward‑facing, Haría shows Manrique the painter‑gardener, the inward‑facing silent crater. We could imagine living in his Haría house.

We didn’t see everything Manrique created, but we did visit Jameos del Agua, Mirador del Río, the Haría house, and the Jardín de Cactus. These are managed by CACT (Centros de Arte, Cultura y Turismo de Lanzarote — the Art, Culture and Tourism Centres of Lanzarote), which is managed by the island’s government (Cabildo de Lanzarote).

Jameos means a large opening in a lava tube, and Jameos del Agua takes advantage of that to create a place that is part meditative and part groovy sixties romper room, and very much worth a visit. The Casa de los Volcanoes is a museum about volcanoes at Jameos del Agua and is very much worth a visit (additional cost on entrance ticket).

The Jardín de Cactus stood out most: a former quarry in a cochineal production area that was transformed into a place of sculpted forms and beautiful plantings. We have always been interested in plants (including cacti) but there, in this setting, we wanted to spend hours reading every label and marveling at the shapes and colors.

On a less optimistic note: Lagomar felt rundown and less maintained. It echoes Manrique — the curves, the grotto-like forms — but it isn’t his creation, nor is it managed by CACT. Lagomar felt more like a tribute than a vision.

  

Photos from the Jardín de Cactus | CACT Lanzarote.

  

Jardín de Cactus | CACT Lanzarote - staircase and cacti.

Landscapes That Require Homework

One Lanzarote wow moment for us came as we left Teguise heading south and entered the La Geria region. We had never seen anything like it. A black landscape studded with repeated sculpted hollows, a landscape that was hypnotic, patterned, and almost alien. Why these shapes? What is the purpose? What exactly are we looking at?

Lanzarote’s agricultural landscapes are easy to admire and hard to decode.

What we had stumbled upon were the pit vineyards of La Geria where each vine planted deep in a hollow and protected from the wind, which on first glance look almost ritualistic.

Before arriving, friends told us to “visit Geria,” and we thought they meant Bodega La Geria, a winery. Only once there did we realize they meant the entire La Geria growing region — silly us.

We took a wine tour at the bodega and learned about the forces shaping this place: the alisios trade winds, the drifting jable sand (biogenic, blown from the coasts), and most importantly the deep layer of rofe (volcanic ash or lapilli) produced by the island’s most recent dramatic natural event in the 18th century.

  
Left and center: View from Bodega La Geria over landscape.
Right: Inside a pit with a vine at La Geria.

Fire and Ash — The Volcanic Layer

Between 1730 and 1736, Lanzarote experienced one of the longest volcanic eruptions in recorded history. Six years of fire buried villages, reshaped the island’s interior, and created the dark expanses of today’s Timanfaya National Park. Where families once farmed, lava fields now stretch in waves. Much of the rofe in La Geria originates from these eruptions.

In the forward of the book “The island of volcanoes: A guide to Lanzarote Geology and Landscape” (Amazon) by Roger Trend the following is used to describe the 6 year event: “Lanzarote is more like an old and dilapidated building that got a new coat of volcanic paint during the 1730-36 eruption, making it look as good as new.”

Most visitors experience Timanfaya from the Islote de Hilario, the popular visitor center, but we signed up for the Tremesana Route, a 3 km guided walk led by a park ranger (sign‑ups here). Our group of eight explored the lunar landscape of lava tubes, ropey pahoehoe, jagged aa, and ash slopes.

Most curious were the fig trees growing this lunar landscape, tucked inside circular stone enclosures deep within the protected zone of the park. These trees are still tended today by families with ancestral rights, a reminder of a past covered and rewritten yet enduring.

During the wine tour at La Gera we descended into a hoyo, a conical pit dug through rofe so the vines can reach pre‑eruption soil. The system of hoyos, plus the semi‑circular socos walls for wind protection, is the feature we first were wowed by. The rofe isn’t just mulch; it insulates, captures moisture, moderates heat, and prevents erosion. The devastation of the eruptions turned out to have a positive side.

Lanzarote’s dryness is tied to its low altitude and smooth profile. The island sits below the trade‑wind inversion layer that traps moisture on higher islands like Tenerife or La Palma. Clouds pass over Lanzarote without releasing rain. Add the island’s orientation and its proximity to Africa, and aridity becomes the baseline condition.

Those same winds sometimes carry the calima — dust‑filled air from the Sahara. We experienced a mild version one afternoon: the sky yellowed, the horizon blurred, and everything looked desaturated. Locals told us that stronger calimas can reduce visibility dramatically.

  
Left: View from Mirador del Rio towards La Graciosa.

Center: View over Famara, northwest coast of Lanzarote.
Right: Ciudad Estratificada Los Roferos near Teseguite, Lanzarote.

Anthropologist Illusion

While visiting the island we were in the middle of reading "The Dawn of Everything", a book by David Graeber and David Wengrow that challenges traditional narratives about human history. The authors argue that societies have never followed a simple evolutionary ladder from egalitarian bands to tribes to chiefdoms to states. Instead, they experimented with different forms of organization — hierarchical, egalitarian, seasonal — often more fluid and surprising than expected.

The book primed us, perhaps too well, to look for deeper cultural structures everywhere. So we arrived with a bit of anthropological hubris — the idea that we might “discover” the real Lanzarote if we looked hard enough. Lanzarote quickly exposed our fantasy. Playa Blanca, Costa Teguise, and the shopping‑mall developments on the southeast coast make it clear we were not in some untouched world.

One day of our visit brought light rain, a rarity. The land seemed to green within hours, or maybe that was our imagination. We took the opportunity to be lazy and wandered around Teguise exploring alleys and watching locals go about their business.

At the devil sculpture in the center of Teguise we read about the Elegua, the diablillo, and the annual rituals. Historically tied to Corpus Christi, and now tied to Carnival, these figures once frightened local children and still hold cultural weight. We wished we could experience the festival rather than read about it.

Nearby, the Besapié sculpture — created by local artist Rigoberto Camacho (who also created Elegua) — commemorates the Rancho de Pascua, a centuries‑old winter musical tradition in which residents play folk music and collect alms for the salvation of souls. Again we felt we were reading footnotes without the book.

The statues reminded us that even visiting is not the same as understanding — no matter how many interpretive panels you read.

  

Statues/sculpture in Teguise, Lanzarote from left to right: Besapié, Teguise - Elegua, el diablillo de Teguise, Lion in the Plaza de La Constitución.

Tourism

Lanzarote has about 160,000 residents but welcomed 3.4 million visitors in 2024, roughly a 20:1 ratio. Other islands’ ratios are Tenerife (6:1), Gran Canaria (5:1), and Fuerteventura (10:1).

Lanzarote’s 20:1 stands out not just for scale but for how tourism concentrates on a small landmass. Yet numbers obscure nuance. Towns like Yaiza, Haría, and Tinajo absorb visitors gently; the resort zones feel like parallel islands.

Ratios don’t capture seasonality, distribution, or who benefits and who endures. Nor do they reflect that tourism supports well over 50% of jobs, and some estimates put it as high as 70% (Promotur, Exceltur).

Over half of Lanzarote’s visitors come from the United Kingdom — typically 50–51% of all arrivals — with Ireland contributing another 5–6% in recent years (according to Cabildo/Promotur tourism reports). At the airport, this was immediately visible: departures boards dominated by destinations like Manchester, Dublin, London‑Gatwick, Birmingham, Bristol.

While checking our luggage, we met an Irish couple on their annual “fly‑and‑flop.” They love Lanzarote precisely because it asks so little of them — a reminder that people come to Lanzarote for different reasons, different layers.

  

Left: Los Ajaches - Playa Caleta del Congrio.
Center: Los Ajaches - Playa Memos.

Right: Mirador del Charco de Los Clicos.

Searching for the Unspoiled

Before coming to Lanzarote, we searched for secluded beaches on Google Maps knowing that we weren’t exactly the only ones doing this. The whole process seems futile. Is a place secluded if it has hundreds of reviews written about it? Or is it a numbers game, where a hundred reviews is better than a thousand and therefore, relatively speaking, more secluded?

One afternoon we entered the Monumento Natural de Los Ajaches in the south of the island. After paying three euros, we drove the long dusty track toward the coast. Ahead: volcanic openness. Behind: the startling line of uniform white developments near Playa Blanca.

Lanzarote is designated a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve (link), acknowledging the island’s work to balance tourism with landscape protection. The boundary we saw — harsh but intentional — reflects this. And yes there are shopping malls and some English enclaves, but relatively speaking the island is well maintained.

At Playa Memos and later Playa Caleta del Congrio (in Los Ajaches), we found only a handful of people, even a few naturists. But when we crested the headland to Playa de Papagayo, the view was wall‑to‑wall towels with the scent of suntan lotion in the air. This was the thousand reviews beach we realized.

   
Left: Mirador del Rio seating area.

Center left: Mirador del Rio staircase.

Center right: View from Lagomar.
Right: Cueva de los Verdes | CACT. The same lava tube as Jameos del Aqua.

Nostalgia as a Travel Companion

In Teguise, we watched old footage of people talking about windmills and gofio (a type of Canarian flour made from roasted grains) in a windmill-turned mini-museum. In Manrique’s house in Haría, we watched videos of him, fit and tan, explaining his inspiration from the island’s volcanic forms.

We realized how often were looking backward on this trip. Every question about the present pulled us toward earlier layers: Majos, pirates, eruptions, agriculture, desalination, Manrique.

It’s an academic instinct: contextualizing everything and studying history, but it helps us. And Rebecca Solnit’s line from No Straight Road Takes You There stayed with us: “The misremembering of the past (or not remembering the past at all) ill equips us to face the future.”

Okay then. Lanzarote’s layers aren’t relics; they’re clues for how the island keeps adapting.

Reading the Layers

In Lanzarote & Wine – Landscape and Culture (Amazon), we learned the island once produced vast cereal crops, earning Lanzarote and Fuerteventura the nickname “the granary of the Canary Islands” from the 16th to 18th centuries. When cereals failed, orchilla dyes and later cochineal sustained the economy.

Today, orchilla is no longer harvested; cochineal survives only in niche production. In fact, the Jardín de Cactus sits on a former cochineal field — one reason Manrique chose it.

Add to this, how the eruption of 1730 – 1736 ushered in a new era of wine growing and the landscape and culture changed, acquired layers.

Layers ask you to slow down, squint a little, wonder why the landscape looks as it does. In another post Why do we travel?, we wrote that exploration is less about finding things than finding awe. Travel gives us a chance to look for it, in the layers.

Lanzarote also reminded us how easily the top layer — our own expectations — obscures everything beneath. Preparation helps. Curiosity helps more.

We suppose this is our travel manifesto: prepare well, then explore widely. Many travelers may prefer to fly and flop. But for us, Lanzarote is a place best understood not by flattening its layers into a single story or dimension, but by returning slowly and attentively, and letting each visit add another thin layer of understanding.  

  

Left: Casa Museo de César Manrique - Haría.
Center: Casa Museo de César Manrique - studio.
Right: Casa Museo de César Manrique in Haría.

P.S. Food Pics

   

Left: Black rice seafood dish.

Center left: Salmorejo.

Center right: Fish croquettes and a salad with goat cheese from the island.

Right: Padrón peppers (Pimientos de Padrón).

   

Left: Seared tuna with papas arrugadas.
Center left: Stuffed artichokes.

Center right: Garbanzos and cod dishes.

Right: Bread and tomato - typical Spanish breakfast item.

  

Left: A gofio-based dessert.
Center: Torrijas (think stuffed French toast) dessert.
Right: Amuse-bouche at Palacio Ico (Teguise) with vermouth.