Timanfaya turns 50: a National Park that was born from a postcard from Mexico

The Canary Islands are celebrating these days the 50th anniversary of one of its most visited national parks, Timanfaya, the Fire Mountains that were transformed into a protected space thanks to the idea that a postcard from Mexico planted in the mind of the then president of the Cabildo of Lanzarote, José Ramírez.

Testimony of one of the longest volcanic eruptions known in Europe (it lasted six years, from 1730 to 1736), the Fire Mountains receive each year nearly one million visitors, attracted by its spectacular geology and by something common to the entire island, the imprint of the artist César Manrique.

The 51 square kilometers of surface of this park, unique in Spain of geological character, cover a large part of the area affected by the eruption of the 18th century, which covered a third of the island with lava and ash, and by those that followed a hundred years later, in 1824, those of the Tao, Nuevo del Fuego and Tinguatón volcanoes.

It is a unique landscape, practically intact, which offers a whole research laboratory on how life makes its way in a devastated land, a space of Martian appearance that even the European and American space agencies (ESA and NASA) have been taking advantage of for years to train the astronauts who will star in future missions to the Moon and the Red Planet.

The process for the creation of the Timanfaya National Park formally began in March 1974, when the director of the extinct Institute for the Conservation of Nature (Icona) requested the Ministry to declare the area as a National Park.

Carried out by the forest engineer Juan Nogales Hernández, the study prior to the creation of the new park had been commissioned a year before and addressed the history of volcanism and the physical, geological, botanical and faunal conditions of the space, as well as the socioeconomic environment, the property regime and a delimitation proposal, which was controversial from the first moment.

The history of the declaration is included in the 'Visitor's Guide to the Timanfaya National Park' (2005), written by Esperanza Martínez Puebla, Jesús Prieto Ruiz and Aurelio Centellas Bodas.

The authors say that the process begins in 1973 from a coincidence, after the then president of the Cabildo, 'Pepín' Ramírez Cerdá, received "a postcard from the then head of the Port of Las Palmas who had just visited a National Park in New Mexico, whose landscape had certain similarities with Timanfaya: an arid area with hardly any vegetation".

Pepín Ramírez, the great promoter of the modern transformation of Lanzarote, together with his childhood friend, César Manrique, concluded after contemplating that postcard that the Fire Mountains of Yaiza and Tinajo were no less valuable or beautiful than the Mexican landscape and ordered the Cabildo to initiate the procedures to achieve the declaration of Timanfaya as a National Park.

During the process, the Icona office in the Canary Islands carried out a large public consultation with provincial and local authorities, in addition to multiple civic societies and associations, from which their support and adhesion to the declaration was obtained. With the decree of August 9, 1974, published in the Official State Gazette on September 17 of the same year, Timanfaya acquired the category of National Park.

At that time, the Fire Mountains had already been operating formally within the network of Art, Culture and Tourism Centers of the Cabildo of Lanzarote for six years.

In 1968, the Route of the Volcanoes was built, the road that runs through the heart of the Mountains, and in one of the points where the heat of the magma is even closer to the surface, the Islote de Hilario, the El Diablo restaurant was built, the work of César Manrique, where food is cooked with the heat of the Earth.

A parking lot for visitors and the popular facilities for exhibiting geothermal anomalies were also set up, which set fire to a bundle of dry straw just by bringing it close to the rocks of a ditch or turn the water that is poured into certain perforations into a geyser in a matter of seconds.

The declaration of National Park guaranteed the protection of the valuable flora and fauna that inhabit the area and half a century later there is a latent public debate about the need to establish a new regime of visits to the Fire Mountains, in order to end the long queues of private vehicles that access the Park daily.