Once again, for the third consecutive week, the José Saramago hall at the César Manrique Foundation in La Plazuela de Arrecife filled to capacity and registered a complete sell-out to see and hear another talk in the "Memoria de Los Jueves" lecture series, organized by the Lanzarote Island Council's Data Center.
This time it was the conference "A Visual Journey Through Love in Lanzarote," a talk given by writer and illustrator Lana Corujo and cultural manager David Machado, which ended up becoming a declaration of love for the island of Lanzarote and its territory, filtered through how art and literature have portrayed the island's landscape.
The two speakers traced a journey that began in the 19th century with the accounts of European travelers who visited the island and began to value and interpret Lanzarote's unique landscape with a new and renewed vision, appreciating the telluric beauty of the lava flows and the silence of the sandy deserts. Authors such as Olivia Stone or Hernández Pacheco planted the seed for a reinterpretation of the island's landscape that would take root, in the 20th century, in names such as Pancho Lasso, César Manrique, Santiago Alemán, or Pedro Tayó in the visual arts, or Agustín Espinosa and Rafael Arozarena in literature.
This revaluation of the territory through art and literature, both from an external point of view – the creator who arrives from outside and discovers the island for the first time – and from an internal one – the creator who stays on the island or who goes into diaspora only to return – was the theme that ran through the conference from beginning to end, but the feelings it provokes were also analyzed: love, love for the island and its idiosyncrasies, but also nostalgia, peace, silence, admiration, everyday life...
To conclude, during the Q&A session, authors from the 21st century were discussed, and the case of Lana Corujo herself and her novel “Han cantado bingo” (Reservoir Books) was mentioned. In this novel, the volcanoes of Lanzarote play a prominent role, and it is already in its tenth edition.
Memory of Thursdays 2026
The "Memory of Thursdays" lecture series is organized by the Data Center, a department of the Cabildo de Lanzarote, and has the collaboration of the César Manrique Foundation. Its main objective is to reflect on the role of photographic and audiovisual archives in today's society, as well as to make the public aware of the collections, content, works, and projects developed by Memoria Digital de Lanzarote.
The next, and final, talk of the Thursdays 2026 Memory series will be:
Thursday, February 5: Island of Cinema. The Cinematic Memory of Lanzarote
Instructor: Saúl Rojas
On the other hand, the Publications Service of the Cabildo de Lanzarote also collaborates in the cycle, making copies of some of the cultural books published by the corporation available to attendees of the talks
