On October 4, 1966, Lanzarote appeared in the press for a reason difficult to imagine today: its volcanoes were going to become the setting for the end of the world. A science fiction production was looking for landscapes on the island capable of representing a Earth devastated by atomic war. While Lanzarote began to discover the enormous tourist potential of its volcanoes and badlands, cinema found another completely different possibility in them: imagining what the planet would look like after destruction.
The announcement could seem strange to readers of that time. A science fiction film was preparing its arrival in Lanzarote to find something that could hardly be reproduced in a film studio. It did not need to build ruins, manufacture craters, or erect a set that simulated the consequences of a nuclear war. The landscape already existed. The lavas, the volcanic fields, the craters, and the badlands provided a natural scenography capable of transforming the island, before the cameras, into any territory after a catastrophe.
The film was initially presented with the title "La máquina de matar" and would later be identified as "La gran catástrofe," directed by Juan García Atienza, who also participated in the plot and screenplay. The project intended to use some of the most desert-like and impressive landscapes in the Canary Islands to represent a world devastated by a nuclear catastrophe.
The news published in Antena, Arrecife, nº 674, on October 4, 1966, precisely placed the project in that context and made the landscapes of the Canary Islands an essential part of the cinematographic proposal. That reference allows us to precisely pinpoint the moment when the news reached the Lanzarote press.
Therein lay the true uniqueness of the story. Lanzarote was not going to play itself. Its volcanoes, its lava fields, and its spaces practically devoid of vegetation were to become the image of an Earth after destruction. Cinema found in the island's geography an appearance that no set could reproduce with the same naturalness.
The choice also held a paradox. Those landscapes that were beginning to acquire increasing value as a tourist attraction could be used by cinema to represent exactly the opposite: a devastated, uninhabitable planet marked by the consequences of a war. The same territory that was beginning to project itself into the future could serve to imagine the world after that future had disappeared.
In 1966, Lanzarote was undergoing a profound transformation. Tourism was beginning to gain a foothold, and the uniqueness of its landscapes was awakening the interest of those seeking new settings for photography, advertising, and cinema. But the cinematic gaze upon the volcanoes could be completely different. Where others were beginning to discover beauty, uniqueness, and economic possibilities, a science fiction film found desolation.
The news was not reduced to a simple cinematic proposal either. The documentation preserved by Filmoteca Canaria allows us to follow the trail of the project and verify that Lanzarote occupied a specific place within the production. The cinematic file records the island as a planned space for exterior filming and links the project with Época Films.
That document is especially important because it allows us to move from journalistic anecdote to a story supported by cinematic documentation. It was not simply that someone had imagined Lanzarote as a possible setting. There was a concrete project, a production, and a plan that placed the island within that film.
Weeks later, the story reappeared in the press. Diario de Las Palmas, in its October 29, 1966 edition, reported that the exteriors would be filmed entirely in Lanzarote and also mentioned the participation of Canary Islands actors such as Víctor Doreste and Paco Acosta. The new reference confirmed that the announcement published at the beginning of October had acquired a much more concrete dimension and that the island was destined to play a relevant role in the production.
The choice of Lanzarote also had an obvious cinematic advantage. Its volcanic landscapes made it possible to eliminate recognizable geographical references and turn the island into practically any place on the planet. A lava flow could cease to be Lanzarote and become the territory of a vanished civilization; a crater could serve as the trace of an explosion, and a malpaís could acquire, before a camera, the appearance of a world that had survived a catastrophe.
In that sense, cinema was discovering something that decades later would become one of Lanzarote's great visual hallmarks: the ability of its landscapes to appear unreal without needing to be transformed. The island did not need to build a set. Its own geography offered settings capable of erasing time and place.
The story is also interesting because of the figure of Juan García Atienza, who would later develop an extensive career linked to legends, traditions, enigmas, and places considered mysterious. In that production, however, he did not need to build a legend around Lanzarote. The island's own geography provided the atmosphere the story needed.
And therein lies a good part of the interest of that news from October 1966. Lanzarote was beginning to build a new image of itself while cinema found in its landscapes the image of a world that had ceased to exist. The island, which was beginning to look towards tourism, appeared at the same time, before the cameras, as a planet after a nuclear war.
The contradiction is especially powerful when viewed from the present. Today, the volcanoes, the lavas, and the malpaíses are an inseparable part of Lanzarote's identity and the image with which the island is internationally recognized. In 1966, those same spaces could be interpreted in a radically different way: not as a symbol of natural beauty, but as the visible trace of a destroyed Earth.
That is why that anniversary deserves to regain its place. On October 4, 1966, a seemingly minor news item announced that a film production wanted to turn Lanzarote into the setting for a nuclear catastrophe. Subsequent documentation makes it possible to verify that behind the announcement there was a real project and that the island was incorporated into its filming schedule.
It is not a story of legends or hidden treasures. Nor does it need to add mysteries that documents cannot prove. Its strength lies precisely in the opposite: in proving that a news item published sixty years ago described an unusual use of a landscape that we know today in a completely different way.
The end of the world had the landscape of Lanzarote. And for a moment in 1966, as the island began to discover the tourist future that would end up transforming it, its volcanoes were imagined as the place where that future had already ended.
Sources:
Antena, Arrecife, nº 674, October 4, 1966, p. 1.
Diario de Las Palmas, October 29, 1966, p. 11.
Filmoteca Canaria, Rodajes en Canarias 1951-1970.
Memoria de Lanzarote.
Add La Voz de Lanzarote as a preferred Google source.
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