Between the devil and the deep blue sea

The devils creep into Teguise every February. Their arrival signaled by the ringing of small handbells, they appear frighteningly attired in goatlike masks with wicked horns and pointy teeth, and white jumpsuits with colorful, talismanic patterns. They also wear running shoes to chase the local children shrieking through the streets, and carry long wooden sticks with goatskin bags at the end–any kid who gets caught is lightly bonked on the head.

This is the carnival of the diabletes, or “little devils”, held here for centuries (except during one long period when the Spanish church and crown outlawed it) in the former colonial capital of Lanzarote. The event began much earlier though, “in the agriculture and fertility rites of the ancient Mahos, or Lanzaroteños,” explains Francisco Hernandez Delgado.

A native of Teguise, who grew up terrified and delighted by the diabletes, Francisco has since studied such customs to a depth that reflects his current job description as official “chronicler” of his hometown. The aboriginal islanders are thought to have imported these eerie, seasonal, demon dances from ancestral villages in North Africa, he explains, which later proved to have much in common with similar rituals performed across Latin America.

When mainland Spaniards conquered the Canary Islands through the 15th century, they brought their own Franciscan festivities. “For Corpus Christi, they staged a fight between good and evil, and incorporated the Lanzarote dancers to represent the devil,” says Francisco. Thus was a pagan tradition spliced into a Christian festival, as part of a broader historical process that saw multiple cultures blend into a single heady entity on the island.

“The mix of aborigines, Moors, Normans, and Castilians created a domain where such gatherings were eventually prohibited by the Holy Inquisition.” The abiding mythology of Lanzarote flowed from this strange genealogical brew, and is also a product of the environment itself, which was melted into shape by volcanoes and is still burning from below.

Epochal eruptions in 1720, 1736, and 1824 created a vast westerly quarter of lava fields and smoking cones, epic landscapes now protected by Los Volcanes Natural Park, which itself sits within Timanfaya National Park. Tour buses, hiking paths, and camel trails range around the rims of lunar-like craters and across the Montañas del Fuego (Fire Mountains) (not really mountains, but petrified surges of magma).

Inside this blast zone is a shadowy chasm ringed by fig trees, leading down a deep dark hole once believed to be a gateway to the underworld. Both volcano and cave are named after Pedro Perico–the local shepherd who did battle here with a huge, malignant, and possibly satanic he-goat. In wrestling the beast, the hero held onto its horns as the pair plunged together into the abyss, never to be seen again.

Or so the story goes, as told through the oral traditions of the island. At least one folklorist has dated the tale to circa 1500, but Professor Domingo Concepción García believes the story is probably older, predating the present landscape and likely derived from another aboriginal legend. A scholar of the island’s biology and gastronomy, the professor subscribes to the theory that Saharan people sailed here with their goats in rudimentary rafts, in a period when the edges of that great desert were much greener than today.

“They also brought cereals, and ancient grains like barley,” he says, and those ingredients went into the distinctive gofio flour that helped sustain the human population, becoming a staple and signature ingredient of Canarian cuisine. Today, it’s used by the best chefs in the island’s finest restaurants, but the professor still makes his own gofio from roasted grains, and drinks the milk of his brother’s goats for breakfast every morning. Coming from a relatively poor farming family, he remembers when the island diet was pretty limited.

“From Monday to Friday it was soup, then Saturdays it was fish, and Sundays it was meat, in the form of compuesta or puchero [simple rustic stews].” The growth of Lanzarote as a travel destination has brought a lot more variety in the last 50 years, he says. And while the topography is generally inhospitable to agriculture – the climate too dry and water sources too few – those past eruptions fertilized the slopes of Timanfaya with nutrient-rich ashes.

A traveler can now taste very good wines at vineyards where the grapes grow well in the volcanic soil, and stop for lunch at El Diablo, where chicken, pork, and steak are cooked over the churning subterranean heat. This iconic restaurant was designed by the late artist César Manrique, who was also responsible for designing the park’s striking visitor center.

Manrique’s many other signature buildings and sculpted landscapes include the Cactus Garden of Guatiza and the cultural center at Jameos del Agua, where live music sounds through volcanic chambers, home to blind albino crabs. He built one of his homes in a palm grove at Haría (now a museum), and another over lava bubbles at Tahíche (now headquarters of the César Manrique Foundation). Visitors can see the paintings he collected by the likes of Picasso and Miró, alongside his own artworks, which tended to draw on the contours and colors of Lanzarote itself… the dusty reds and scorched blacks of past disaster areas long since turned eerily beautiful; the azure sky and cobalt sea beyond; the deep green of olivine crystals (also found in meteorites and on the surface of Mars) used to make the local peridot jewelry; and the orange-yellow of ancient xanthoria lichens that are the island’s oldest living things.

There is also the bright white paint on traditional housing, often with blue or green exterior woodwork, and distinctive roofs and patios canted to collect the occasional rain. Manrique lobbied to preserve such designs during the early years of the tourist boom. His passionate defense of Lanzarote’s architecture is probably the biggest single reason that even the busiest coastal resorts–Puerto del Carmen, Playa Blanca, Costa Teguise–are not dominated by generic high-rise holiday apartments, and retain their original village feel.

A certain equilibrium defines even quieter beach communities like La Santa, which still harbors a small fishing fleet, even as it draws visitors from around the world for watersports. The offshore winds and waves are especially alluring to surfers, who can ride the celebrated left-hand break all day, then feast on the equally renowned local red prawns in the evening.

Such enclaves encircle the whole island. The westward edges of Pedro Perico country drop away to hidden coves where shearwaters and peregrine falcons hover over sheltered beaches. To the north lie the fine toasted sands and chiringuito bars of La Garita beach, and the contrasting calm of Caletón Blanco, with its vivid aquamarine pool between lava formations.

This is Lanzarote in microcosm, where magma-moulded moonscapes meet the sea from which they emerged, and suggest the kind of natural balance that we humans can only wonder at. César Manrique put it this way: "The universe has already discovered all things. All we have to do now is be more humble… and try by all means to learn from the experience of millions of centuries of this marvelous spatial harmony which it has been our fate to discover.”