Before the beaches and the volcano tours, Lanzarote was already old. The island's first inhabitants, the Majos, arrived from North Africa many centuries before Europeans, and learned to survive on an island with almost no fresh water — herding goats, farming barley, storing rain in hollows of the rock, and leaving behind enigmatic carvings and the foundations of their stone houses.
Europe stumbled upon Lanzarote at the dawn of the age of exploration. The island owes its modern name to a Genoese navigator, Lancelotto Malocello, who arrived around the beginning of the fourteenth century. In 1402, the Norman knight Jean de Béthencourt landed in the south and began, from Lanzarote, the European conquest of the Canary Islands — making this small island the doorway to an entire archipelago.
The centuries that followed were harsh and dramatic. From its hilltop above Teguise, the Castillo de Santa Bárbara watched for the sails of pirates and corsairs — Berber, English, French — who raided the island again and again; islanders learned to hide in volcanic caves like the Cueva de los Verdes, whose tunnels sheltered entire villages. On the coast, fortresses like the Castillo de San Gabriel and the Castillo de San José still stand guard over Arrecife's harbours.
Then came the volcano. The great eruptions of 1730–1736 buried some of the island's most fertile land and pushed many families to emigrate — yet those who stayed invented new ways to farm on ash, from the vineyards of La Geria to fields mulched with volcanic gravel. In the nineteenth century, Lanzarote lived from salt, fishing and the cochineal insect, which produced a crimson dye prized across Europe; Arrecife, city of ports, became the capital in the mid-1800s.
The twentieth century brought the island's greatest transformation: tourism — guided, thanks to César Manrique and a far-sighted generation, along a path that protected the island's soul. Today's Lanzarote is the sum of all these lives: aboriginal shepherds, navigators, pirates, wine farmers and artists. Walk anywhere on the island, and a thousand years walk with you.