Five ways to pamper your wellbeing in Lanzarote
Hands up anyone who has felt colossal stress in the last year. One, two, five, twenty… OK, we are legion. How about if we put it right? We suggest a holiday on a therapeutic island. Objective: recharging your batteries.
Your battery indicator has been flashing a worrying red for a few months now. You’ve lost too much weight. Or put on too much weight. You’re irritable. You’ve been having a hard time getting to sleep and unsuspected parts of your body have contracted with tension.
It’s gone far enough.
Time to act. 🖐
You need to recharge your batteries, so your next holiday will be all about pleasure and health. Priority: feeling good.
1 Much (much, much) more than a hotel
Hydrotherapy equipment, a physiotherapist two hundred metres from your room, yoga sessions at sunset, breakfasts with fresh fruit and eggs from happy chickens, the sound of birds flying over a fig tree when you wake up, a treadmill with an anti-gravity air chamber to take the weight off your joints?
Think about the services and amenities that best suit your plan and choose the accommodation that best suits your needs. In Lanzarote you will find hotels, flats, rural houses and historic buildings. The tricky part is narrowing the choice down to just one.
2 Vitamin D, come to me!
This vitamin is activated when the skin comes into contact with ultraviolet rays and is a great ally of the immune system.
During last year’s lockdown, the Spanish Society of General and Family Physicians prescribed a minimum of fifteen minutes of sunlight per day: this is the dose needed by our body’s cells to carry out their functions, including lymphocytes, the army that protects our bodies from infection.
Like everything, success is all about balance. It’s just as bad to be a Nosferatu running away from vitamin D as it is to indulge in hours of sun exposure without sufficient protection. Remember that we are very close to the planet’s equator and the UV index is very high.
Saying “bah, I don’t burn” is like saying that the Earth is flat. Apply sunscreen fifteen minutes before lying out in the sun, and enjoy that delicious and beneficial tingle all over your body.
3 Anti-stress since the end of the 18th century
For three centuries, European travellers have been choosing the Canary Islands for recovering their mental and physical health. For giving themselves a break. To take care of themselves and practice responsible hedonism.
The climate is the most powerful reason: Lanzarote is in the subtropical belt of the northern hemisphere, less than a hundred kilometres from the African coast. Moreover, we enjoy different microclimates. Enjoying the sunset on the coast, for example in Punta Mujeres, is not the same thing as watching it in a beautiful inland village like Masdache. The aromas, humidity and temperatures are different.
Lanzarote is a natural spa. Juan de León Perdomo, a resident of Haría who went to the Americas and returned to the island to build a rest home for his daughter, who was ill with tuberculosis, was well aware of this. The result can be seen today in Arrieta: they call it ‘La Juanita’ or the ‘Casa China’, because of its roof with the air of an oriental pagoda.
Another example of architecture destined for bathing for health can be found in the fishing-surfing village of Famara: it is the little house of a philanthropist called Luis Ramírez, a modernist fantasy full of octopuses and marine elements that he built, under prescription, to wrap himself in what we call here the maresía: a beneficial sea spray.
4 Slow travel: relax
Even our neighbours in Gran Canaria notice the difference, and from time to time they treat themselves to a trip to Lanzarote to remind themselves that it IS possible to drive without traffic jams, to escape the noise and to find delightful places where there are no crowds or queues.
The crops grown in the island’s jable and rofe soils, the most sustainable and beautiful works of art, the terraces by the sea where you can have a beer and go for a dip in an endless loop of beer-dip-beer-beer-dip… Lanzarote offers a lot with very little.
As the writer Alexis Ravelo says in his La ceguera del cangrejo (The Blindness of the Crab) (a highly recommended read for your stay, especially if you like crime novels): in Lanzarote, everything important is hidden and everything is close by.
The island translates what we in the tourism sector call “slow travel” into very specific (and restorative) experiences. Strolling. Silencing the clock. Boycotting the tyranny of the smartphone. You’re in charge here.
5 Thalassotherapy, aloe vera, sport, gofio!
Many companies choose Lanzarote as a destination for organising an anti-stress cure for their employees. There are many ills derived from the current pace of life and the island acts as a relaxing massage at all levels.
Lanzarote offers an endless number of plans against contemporary fatigue:
- Floating in the sea, sinking your feet into the sand, letting yourself be enveloped by the iodised breeze.
- Trying a moisturising cream made from aloe vera grown on Lanzarote.
- Visiting the restaurants that serve gastronomy based on local, fresh, seasonal produce (try the gofio escaldado).
- Rediscovering the sounds of nature. Goodbye, city noises. Hello, seagulls, waves, fruit trees swaying in the wind.
- Enjoying a hydrothermal circuit.
- Taking a leisurely hike along a path.
- Touching the mineral soil of the island, caressing the textures of the rocks.
- Discovering that sport (at your own pace, whatever it is) clears the mind and releases tension.
- Finding yourself again. Listening to yourself.
Here, we usually give a single piece of advice to friends who are feeling a bit overwhelmed: “Relax, you’ve only got one life.”