Lanzarote Through the Eyes of José Saramago: “The Journey Never Ends”

How about enjoying a literary visit to Lanzarote through the youthful gaze of Rafael Arozarena, the astonishment of the explorer Olivia Stone, the admiration of the poet Gabriela Mistral and the commitment of José Saramago, who chose to put down roots and make this his land? Allow these illustrious guides to open your eyes to the thousand realities of a space, “which is like the beginning and the end of the world”, as the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature put it.

On Camel Through Lanzarote

Lanzarote is welcoming. This is what the Irishwoman Olivia Stone said in 1884, when she landed on an island marked by volcanic activity and scarcity. “How kind Lanzarote is. There is none among the seven islands for which I feel more affection”, wrote the eccentric explorer in her travel diaries. She travelled with her notebooks, paintbrushes and camera to document her steps, and it could be said that she was a pioneering version of the type of visitor who comes to the island today, more interested in blending into our way of life than anything else.

Stone wrote very complete travel guides, of which the island has its own edition. Her viewpoint is astonishingly modern, and “inaugurates a new poetic discourse on the Canarian landscape, where the aesthetic values linked to rugged volcanism and dry fields take centre stage (…) Paradise need not necessarily be a green place”, says José Betancort in the prologue to the book En camello por Lanzarote (On Camel Through Lanzarote), published by Itineraria.

It was the landscape resulting from the volcanic eruptions that most impressed Olivia Stone. The first eruptions were between 1730 and 1736, the longest on record on Earth, and the second took place in 1824. Two centuries later, we are still moved by the overwhelming sight of craters, lava flows and lunar landscapes.

Saramago’s island

“All this can be told in a different way”, said Nobel Prize winner José Saramago, after admitting that living on the island had changed the way he wrote. Among the many traces of Lanzarote in his books is none other than the sight loss suffered by the characters in Blindness, an idea that was introduced by the writer after a visit with some friends to the Mirador del Río. A sea of clouds prevented the group from seeing La Graciosa from the Risco de Famara, just as a “sea of milk” prevents the protagonist of the book from seeing: “It is as if he were in the middle of a thick fog, it is as if he had fallen into a sea of milk” (Blindness, 1995).

Saramago felt his connection with Lanzarote the very moment he set foot on the island for the first time. It didn’t take long for he and his wife Pilar de Río to settle in the village of Tías, where A Casa Museo Saramago, the writer’s personal residence from 1993 until his death in 2010, is located. It is fascinating to breathe in the harmonious existence of a man who found here a place to write – a place that even influenced his style and themes, making them “more universal and allegorical”, as Portuguese professor Carlos Reis says.

Saramago dealt with human and existential themes in his novels, but he also shared his personal reflections on what the island communicated to him. His Lanzarote family had given him a notebook as a gift to carry out this exercise, which he generously turned into Lanzarote Notebooks, published over several editions.

The Notebooks are a unique opportunity to rediscover Lanzarote through the eyes of the Nobel Prize winner, from its most iconic and visited corners, such as the Jameos del Agua, where he saw “how a ray of light came down from a hole in the roof of the cavern and crossed the limpid water, illuminating the bottom, seven metres below, to the point where it seemed as if we could touch it with our hands”, to the inspiring metaphysics of the landscape. For example, from Lanzarote, the writer saw his life as “an immense blank space” and time on the island as “a path that runs slowly through it”.

The creator of fascinating contemporary parables about the human condition was nourished by the “otherworldly” atmosphere he perceived in Lanzarote. “It has a different kind of beauty, a rough, harsh beauty… Those basalts, those ravines… Sometimes, I have thought that, if I had been looking for a landscape that corresponded to an inner need of mine, I think that landscape would be Lanzarote’s”.

What more is there to say? We invite you to put on Saramago’s iconic glasses and see what only he knew how to describe in words.

The unreal sunsets of Arozarena

The novel by Rafael Arozarena that led to Femés (Yaiza) and the character of Mararía becoming a publishing phenomenon and a film that won the 1998 Goya for Cinematography was born of an anecdote from the author’s youth, as he himself has explained. “I came from a contrary, lyrical and merry island [Tenerife], but I received a surprise, or rather a poetic shock here in Femés, where I learned the great lesson of the beauty contained in a sparse, simple and profound landscape.”

The “shock” he refers to is none other than the appearance of a female figure silhouetted against the horizon on the Los Ajaches plains, describing it thus: “it was sunset, that time when the sun looks at us sideways and its two lights are produced, the real and the magical”. The woman, dressed in the style of a Lanzarote peasant woman to avoid the piercing sun, caused such a stir in the then 20-year-old Arozarena that, according to him, she was “the first miracle” he witnessed in Femés.

The “naked and brutal” land of Gabriela Mistral

One visit by Gabriela Mistral was enough for the Chilean poet to allude to the volcanic beauty of the island in her book of poems Tala: “I love the naked and brutal earth”, she said, defining the rare balance between wind, earth and fire of a nature without artifice.

Has the perfection of Mistral’s line stirred your creative energy? If so, grab your rucksack, pen and paper and let the overwhelming silence of the landscape, broken only by the breeze, envelop you. Become a regular in the squares, teleclubs and streets, where the simple but grandiose idiosyncrasy of those who know they are living in an extraordinary place is still intact.