Before we tell you about campervans, we wanted to tell you about the island. Because Lanzarote isn't just what you see in the photos: it's its people, its history, and the way it has learned to look after itself.
Lanzarote is an island that has decided, deliberately and with real effort, not to look like any other tourist destination. It was born from eruptions that buried entire villages under lava in the 18th century, and instead of hiding that history, the island has turned it into its identity: white houses over black earth, vineyards growing inside craters, a national park that looks like another planet. It deserves to be looked at slowly, not just driven through on the way to the next beach.
You can't talk about Lanzarote without talking about César Manrique. Born in Arrecife in 1919, a painter, sculptor and architect, he returned to the island in the 1960s after living in Madrid and New York with a clear idea: tourism didn't have to destroy what made a place worth visiting. He led the fight for an island with no high-rise buildings and no roadside billboards, and turned that fight into his own work, blending architecture and volcanic landscape in a way that was radically different from anything else at the time.
His imprint is all over the island: the Jameos del Agua, the Cueva de los Verdes, the Mirador del Río looking out over La Graciosa, the Jardín de Cactus with over a thousand species. His former home, built over volcanic lava bubbles, is now the Fundación César Manrique and welcomes hundreds of thousands of visitors a year. If you need one reason to understand why Lanzarote looks the way it does — no giant hotels blocking the coastline, houses always kept white — it's him.
The character of the "conejeros" — as people born in Lanzarote are known — is calm, warm and down-to-earth, which makes more sense once you know the island's history: almost no fresh water, volcanic soil, and generations that made a living from fishing and from farming that pulled fruit out of ash. That memory of hard work shows in how people treat you: hospitable, but without any fuss.
That identity also comes through in the music and folklore: timples, guitars, romances and popular coplas played at local gatherings and festivals like the Ranchos de Pascua in Teguise. This isn't folklore staged for tourists — it's what's still played and danced at each town's own festivals.
The island's most deeply rooted festival is that of the Virgen de los Volcanes, Lanzarote's patron saint, held every September 15th in Mancha Blanca: people from every town walk from early morning, accompanied by timples and guitars, to bring flowers and farm produce to the chapel. It's both an agricultural and a religious celebration, and one of the best ways to understand how this island relates to the land that feeds it.
Carnival, especially in Arrecife with its Fiesta de la Máscara, is the other big date on the festival calendar: a full week of music and colour in the middle of winter, when the island fills the streets.
Lanzarote's cooking looks equally to the sea and to its own volcanic land. Papas arrugadas with mojo picón and mojo verde sauces sit on almost every table, and sancocho — salted fish with potatoes and sweet potato — is the stew that best defines Canarian cuisine. Along the coast, grilled limpets (lapas) with a garlic, parsley and white wine dressing are a classic that never disappoints, and gofio — toasted grain flour, a direct legacy of the island's original Guanche inhabitants — still turns up in both sweet and savoury dishes. To finish, try frangollo or bienmesabe.
And then there's the wine. In La Geria, vines grow in pits dug into volcanic ash (picón), sheltered from the wind by semicircular stone walls — a unique growing system designed to trap the little moisture in the air. The malvasía grape, golden in colour with a distinctive aroma, is the star, though moscatel, listán and other varieties are also grown at wineries such as La Geria or Guiguan. If you're doing our 3-day route or the 7-day route, a stop at a La Geria winery is well worth it.
Lanzarote has been a full UNESCO Biosphere Reserve since 1993, one of the few islands in the world with that complete designation. That's not a decorative fact: it means the balance between what the island offers and what it receives from the people who visit is a fragile one, and looking after it depends on everyone who passes through. We live on this island, and that's why, when you rent our campervan, we don't just hand you the keys: we tell you where you can stop, where you can't, and why. It's not bureaucracy — we just want the island to stay this special when you come back.