Island Guide

Click below to view fantastic 360º panorama tours of the whole island.

Click below to see a fantastic video of island landscape filmed in 96 hours in Nov 2011. Turn your speakers on! Try right clicking on video screen and selectinbg couch mode for full screen. Brilliant.

The most northerly and easterly of the Canary Islands, Lanzarote is 60 km long and 21 km wide over an area of 797 square km. The least mountainous of the islands, it has an average year-round temperature of 20 degrees. There is nearly always a breeze so you rarely feel uncomfortable even when it's very hot and it's generally pleasantly cool at night.

The fate of this extraordinary island was decided over two and a half centuries ago, when the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history took place, leaving a strange and alluring countryside in its wake - a landscape littered with volcanoes and dark streams of jagged lava. The island remains unspoilt by the concrete tourist developments affecting neighbouring Tenerife, due largely to the influence of the artist-designer, the late Cesar Manrique who worked to preserve the island's environmental heritage and whose influence abounds. In 1994, the island was declared a 'World Reserve of the Bioshere' by UNESCO. There are numerous protected areas throughout the island and it is regarded as one of the healthiest places on earth to live!

Places of interest to visit

It's hard not to get away from it all on Lanzarote. The fledgling tourist industry is confined to a small number of resorts, with huge areas of unspoilt countryside, beaches and volcanic 'malpais' all within a short distance. Some top attractions on the island can be viewed by clicking here.

Beaches on Lanzarote

The beaches are simply fabulous. There is something for everyone, whether you like secluded coves, wide stretches of golden sands, rocky coastlines with tidal pools or crashing breakers...you will find it all on Lanzarote. A surprise to many first time visitors is how golden the vast majority of beaches are...hardly any black sand to be found! Click on the map below for a guide to the main beaches on the island.

Enjoy our slide show of photos of our favourite spots on the island

Enjoy this piece about Lanzarote from Mike Carter, award winning travel writer.

There are always two responses when people find out that you're a travel writer. The first is "jammy bugger". The second: "So, what’s your favourite place then?" This is hard to answer. Things change. You change. I've been lucky enough to Kayak with whales in Alaska, dog-sled across frozen Lake Baikal in Siberia, climb one of Nepal's highest mountains and explore the voodoo villages of Benin. I am, indeed, a jammy bugger. But my answer usually comes as something of a surprise. "Lanzarote," I say. "Lanzarote?" they reply, scratching their heads and chins. But it's true. I love Lanzarote. Maybe it's because the first time I visited I wasn't burdened by expectations. I'd gone on a beach holiday, got bored and then gone off to explore in a hire car. As I discovered it was two profound influences that united to forge Lanzarote's character: the huge volcanic eruptions of the 1730s that created a chaotic new landscape; and the local architect and artist Cesar Manrique, who turned volcanic ruin into art.

At a traffic island in Tahiche, I nearly crashed the car. There, in the middle of the roundabout, was a giant wind sculpture of whirling whisks, orbs and discs, like a huge mobile of the orbiting planets. I pulled over, walked to the roundabout, read a sign that said 'Manrique'. In Tahiche itself was the Fundacion Cesar Manrique, where the artist lived until his death in 1992. He'd built the house buried in the lava, transforming volcanic bubbles into rooms and linking them with tight tunnels to create a true troglodyte fantasy.

But the magical mystery tour was only just beginning. At the Jameos del Agua I found a series of underground lava tunnels - formed when Monte Corona erupted - that Manrique transformed into a restaurant and concert hall, with a roof of lava slabs and uplighters in magma pockets. Outside was a lagoon, where blind albino crabs - usually found in the deepest oceans-scampered around, deposited here for eternity by the eruptions.

I headed north, through villages of whitewashed houses, with their bottle-green doors and Moorish-style onion domes, and then south, through the black, lunar Valle de la Geria, Lanzarote's wine¬growing region, where vines grow in pretty little crescent terraces.

And finally, it was on to Timanfaya National Park, where the most violent eruptions occurred. At its centre, Fire Mountain still glows a malevolent scarlet, like a firework with a faltering fuse. This landscape is otherworldly; rivers of calcified, tortured lava stand frozen in time, and the volcanoes sit silently, their peaks lopped off like breakfast eggs. Apparently, NASA even showed its astronauts pictures of Timanfaya to prepare them for the Moon.

Manrique got here too, building the sober-looking visitor centre from lava bricks, aptly called El Diablo. Food is cooked over a giant pit where, only 40ft below, the temperature reaches 400C. Outside, guides shove aruga bushes into craters where they promptly burst into flames; water is poured into a buried tube, to be violently expelled seconds later 30ft into the air as steam, like a landlocked whale was clearing its blowhole. It is magnificent: primordial and elemental. I drove back to the beach, grinning, like a man who'd just discovered fairies at the bottom of his garden