The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has granted Lanzarote recognition as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System (GIAHS), making it the first European island to receive this international distinction. This title represents the highest global recognition of living, resilient, and sustainably managed agricultural landscapes managed in a traditional way.
The recognition underscores the exceptional value of the island's three ancestral agricultural systems: the natural sand mulching of La Geria, the artificial sand mulching of the north, and the cultivation on organogenic sands of El Jable, all of which are the result of local knowledge and the adaptation of human beings to an environment with extreme climatic conditions, marked by water scarcity and trade winds.
The president of the Cabildo of Lanzarote, Oswaldo Betancort, has described this designation as "an unprecedented achievement that places Lanzarote as a world leader in agricultural sustainability and environmental resilience." "This international recognition from the FAO," adds Betancort, "highlights the ingenuity of generations of farmers who, with wisdom, effort, and love for the land, have transformed aridity into life and landscape. It is also an endorsement of the active conservation model that we promote from the Cabildo, which is committed to preserving our agricultural and cultural heritage."
The president recalled that "the Cabildo has been working on an agricultural sustainability strategy through programs such as Guardians of the Territory, the recovery of abandoned farms, subsidies for pit cultivation, irrigation aid, the promotion of generational change, and the restoration of cisterns and maretas, among other actions included in the action plan presented with the candidacy."
For his part, the island councilor for Landscape and Food Sovereignty, Samuel Martín, stressed that the recognition "reinforces Lanzarote's identity as an agricultural island, as a territory that has known how to combine tradition, knowledge, and adaptation to turn scarcity into a model of sustainability admired by the world."
"This GIAHS is a collective recognition of the effort of our rural communities, but also an opportunity to continue advancing in policies of food sovereignty, biodiversity, and valorization of the agricultural landscape as an environmental, economic, and tourist resource," he declared.
Recent visit from the Scientific Advisory Group
The FAO's recognition comes after the recent visit to Lanzarote by its Scientific Advisory Group, headed by expert Tiziano Tempesta, who toured the island to evaluate the candidacy on the ground. During their stay, the evaluators visited farms in La Geria, Los Valles, and El Jable, in addition to holding meetings with technicians from the Biosphere Reserve, the UNESCO Global Geopark, town councils, and the drafting team of the proposal.
With this new recognition, Lanzarote joins a select club of territories with high agricultural, landscape, cultural, and anthropological value. In the words of the evaluation committee itself, "Lanzarote's agro-systems are unique in the world; it is surprising how, despite the harsh environmental conditions, stable and sustainable agriculture has been achieved based on ancestral soil management techniques such as rofe or jable."
Lanzarote joins the international elite of territories with unique agricultural systems such as La Huerta de Valencia, the Valle Salado de Añana in Álava, or the millenary olive trees of the Territorio Sénia, making Spain the European country with the highest number of GIAHS and the third worldwide, only behind China and Japan.
