Unconfirmed Reports

Before the Spanish came to the Canary Islands, on their way to conquering South America, there was a people known as the Guanches living throughout the islands. They are thought to have descended from a mixture of northern European and west African peoples, and there is evidence suggesting that many of them had dark skin and blue eyes. But we are unlikely to learn any more certain details about them now, as the Spanish killed them all fairly swiftly. In those days colonialism was vicious and to the point; in this enlightened era is it now rather more circumspect.

My girlfriends’s mother, Ana Jord’an, has lived virtually all her life in Lanzarote. She is currently living in the town of Playa Blanca, at the very southern tip of the island, and we are walking along the beachfront there as she tells me:

“Here there used to be just a few houses, when I was young. It was just a little town of fishermen. This building used to be the storehouse for fish. They would pack them in salt, because there weren’t fridges or anything back in those days.”

The building still has the look of a store-house: it is old and crumbling, undecorated, and undeniably solid. But now it has a new glass patio affixed to it, and it has been converted into a rather expensive restaurant, El Almac’en de Sal. And it is no longer the biggest building in town; it is now just a historical curiosity, in a town that nobody visits for its history. It now sits mostly unnoticed in a sprawling white mass of tourist apartments and hotels.

The trickle of tourists who once found their way to Lanzarote, seeking something different on an island set far apart from Europe, has now turned into a flood of package-holiday-makers, taking advantage of the budget prices on sun and sea. The quanitity of visitors is now fifty times what it was in the 1970s. Playa Blanca has become one of the hot-spots for growth, as other parts of Lanzarote are now over-crowded and over-priced.

The beach-front in Playa Blanca is an area protected for its ecological value and natural beauty. At least, by law it is protected; yet in the last few years, three massive hotels have been built right on the beach front. The large companies that have the greatest hand in Lanzarote tourism wield enormous power here, and can simply defy the law when it suits their business interests. The coastline that was once the collective heritage of all Lanzarote residents, as well as anyone who cared to visit, has now been fenced in, with card-only access, restricted to the clients of the hotels.

Many of the visitors to Playa Blanca stay within the fenced enclosures of these hotel resorts, leaving the new developments in the town centre rather empty and lifeless. Restauranteurs sieve what they can out of the bored, sunglassed wanderers; a desperate little pedestrian mall is lined with knick-knack shops that have never been able to settle on a credible local specialty; and on a roundabout that is the dead centre of Playa Blanca, an old man who has been there since before it all began has maintained his little house. He still goes out to dine on his porch every evening, where he attracts a mild ripple of interest from the passing tourists. “He’s a bit of clown,” Ana tells me.

Lanzarote is a small enough place that individual characters can have great influence. One of the most notable - as opposed to notorious - is C’esar Manrique. Manrique was an artist and architect who during the 1980s and 90s dedicated himself to creating sculptures, monuments and buildings that compliment the geographic aesthetics of the island, celebrate its folk traditions, and respect its ecology. While Manrique was alive and working, he successfully applied a restraining force on touristic development in Lanzarote. Since his death, however, there has been no figure of such positive influence, and the developers have had things more or less as they like.

There are pockets of resistance. In the small town of Tinajo, which is not on the beach (though nowhere on an island this small is far from a beach), developers tried to build a large hotel. During the construction process, the local residents came at night and took the hotel-in-progress apart. When the developers tried again, the locals resisted again in the same way. Thanks to this seemingly crude method of heritage protection, Tinajo remains one of the few places in Lanzarote that has not been seriously changed by tourism.

On the other hand, there are probably some in Tinajo who would have liked to see the hotel completed. Ana Jord’an, for example, refuses to criticise Lanzarote tourism. She has worked all her life in bars and cafes on the island, and tourism is now her source of economic survival - as it is for the majority of residents.

As we drive through the hinterland of Lanzarote, Ana points out to me a lonely house on a hill, where she says her uncle lives. She says he is 70 years old, has never worked, but instead passes his days “smoking marijuana and dancing”. She says he is “one of the authentic bohemians”. There is nothing to stop her uncle living this life of leisure, as he is part of one of the traditional land-owning families on the island. Ana was just a little too bohemian in her youth, and has ever since been cut off from the vast material resources of the family. Thus her reliance on the tourist industry.

But northern European tourists are not the only people coming to the Canary Islands. On average, about two boatloads of African refugees arrived each day of 2006 – a total of over 30,000 desperate persons arriving in the course of the year. The crossing, which typically begins from various points on the coast of Senegal, Mauritius or Western Sahara, is fairly dangerous, and claims an indeterminate, but surely grievous, death-toll. In the words of a young man recently interviewed in El Pa’is as part of a feature on “the Eurogeneration”: “I used to see them arriving every day at the beach, crammed into their pateras. They must be pretty screwed in their countries to come here. This is no paradise.” The Spanish authorities have a vague and sprawling system for boat-people arriving sin papeles, and some find work in the Canary Islands – typically in construction or maintenance – to carry them through the naturalisation “process”.

Between the black, poor people arriving from the south, and the far greater quantity of white rich people arriving from the north, Lanzarote is experiencing rapid demographic and cultural change. Many signs are in English and German first, then Spanish second, and there a large proportion of business activity caters specifically to northern European tastes. The African immigrants, meanwhile, have their own developing networks and resources, though these are much less visible. Word on the street is that most African people arriving in boats have a “connection” here in the Canaries, who they can go to while they recuperate from the journey, and hopefully to find employment.

A new culture of consumption, and a new workforce to provide for it, are both being rapidly imported to Lanzarote. There are serious questions about whether this growing economy will enrich the island, or destroy it. Money is coming in, but wages remain very low by European standards, so that many locals, while employed in tourist business and having left behind their volcanic vineyards, do not experience much material benefit. As is so often the case, it is a few entrepreneurial, and often ruthless or corrupt people, who are the main beneficiaries of this economic growth.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the changes affecting Lanzarote is environmental. The island entirely lacks fresh water, and is therefore supported by water and produce shipped over from the Spanish penninsula, as well as carbon fuels that come from God-knows-where. The strong winds that sweep across the island could be used to make Lanzarote more energy self-sufficient, but this resource has barely been tapped. Recycling doesn’t seem to interest the government much either: on La Graciosa, a tiny “sub-island” just off the coast of Lanzarote, the otherwise beautiful, lunar landscape is suddenly disturbed by a massive rubbish tip on the beach. This tip glows with green and amber lights, as the sun catches all the bottles and other containers that have been dumped here, since recycling is barely available. Despite the island’s growing population, public transport remains almost non-existant.

Writes Mario Ferrer in Majalula, a youthful magazine that has recently been founded on Lanzarote, “We are a floating laboratory of globalisation. Geographically African, politically European and culturally connected to South America, Lanzarote’s situation is a perfect example of interconnection and planetary uniformity…”

I would add to this a further comment on how Lanzarote represents the state of the world: that it is beautiful, luxurious… but unsustainable. It is set on a path of consumption and “growth” that is trampling resources, both cultural and natural - a glimpse of hope for some who have experienced real poverty, but a sound of warning for those of us who are wondering where the Earth will be in 20 years’ time.