Arrecife

Arrecife is the capital and main port of Lanzarote, a low, sun-bleached town strung along the island’s east coast. Its name comes from the Spanish word for reef: a line of black volcanic reefs runs just offshore, and behind them boats could shelter and hide. The old town is flat and compact, easy to walk, and wrapped around a saltwater lagoon rather than a grand square.

For centuries Arrecife was only a small fishing and trading port, while the island’s capital sat safely inland at Teguise, out of reach of the corsairs who raided the coast. Only in 1852, with the age of piracy long over, did Arrecife finally take the capital’s crown and begin to grow into the town you walk today.

The older of the two forts, the Castillo de San Gabriel, sits on a small islet at the harbour mouth and was built in the sixteenth century to fend off pirates. It is reached by a slender causeway and drawbridge, the Puente de las Bolas, named for the pair of stone spheres on its pillars and often called the only bridge of its kind in the Canaries. Today the fort holds the town’s history museum.

The grander Castillo de San José was built in the 1770s on the orders of King Carlos III. Because it was raised during a hard famine to give hungry islanders paid work, locals nicknamed it the Fortress of Hunger. In the 1970s the artist César Manrique restored it and turned it into a museum of contemporary art, the MIAC, so a symbol of hunger became a temple of modern art.

At the heart of town lies the Charco de San Ginés, a tidal saltwater lagoon that fills and empties with the sea twice a day, ringed by small fishing boats and low white houses. This was the site of the first fishermen’s huts, the seed from which the city grew. A short walk away stands the Iglesia de San Ginés, the town’s mother church, dedicated to its patron.

Arrecife’s most famous son is César Manrique, born here in 1919, the painter and architect whose vision gave Lanzarote its low white houses, its ban on roadside billboards and its fusion of art with the volcanic landscape. Walk the town with his name in mind and you start to see his hand everywhere, from the castle museum to the look of the streets themselves.

Start at the Charco de San Ginés and follow the water to the seafront, then cross the Puente de las Bolas to the Castillo de San Gabriel for the view back over the town. Walk the palm-lined avenue for the Gran Hotel, the island’s tallest building, and the calm town beach of Playa del Reducto. The Castillo de San José and its art museum sit a little further along the shore to the north.