Landscape does not exist without culture. It is a collective construction that depends on the gaze, memory, and meanings that a society places on a territory. It is not just about volcanoes and trade winds, but about history, climatology, and social development condensed into the same scene. The territory becomes a landscape when a community names it, works it, celebrates it, and protects it.
If we pay attention to the local scale and not a global abstraction, in the mid-20th century our island radically resignified its geography and its imaginary. Lanzarote is a tremendous example of how a territory can be culturally transformed into a landscape. There was a profound change, a before and after in the collective perception of this land.
I am from that millennial generation that grew up between the Internet, Nokia mobile phones, and music on CD and MP3. But I was fortunate to do so on an island where the trades and rhythms of a previous world were still visible. There were calloused hands and anchored memories: families who dedicated themselves to onion cultivation, laborers who extracted life from an arid land, sailors who sought sustenance on African coasts, and women who started working in canneries and packaging, paving the way for a new emancipation. For a young reader, it may sound like prehistory, but until very recently, two eras coexisted in Lanzarote: that of community knowledge and that of an accelerated modernity that, depending on the political winds, sometimes ran uncontrollably and sometimes tried to contain itself.
There was a turning point of capital importance: water. Desalination definitively altered the horizon of possibilities. The horizon of possible events and possibilities multiplied; our destiny was no longer one, but hundreds of possible models to implement. Thirst ceased to be a hindrance to our development, and an idea of the future unfolded. The island went from being in the external imaginary "bad land", "unproductive field" or "the Cinderella of the Canary Islands" to consolidating the poetic brand of "island of volcanoes", where art, nature and life dialogue. From there, a cycle of exponential growth opened. Not only did infrastructures arrive, but also hotels, apartments and new urbanizations. With each opening, more employment; with more employment, more population, and many times we have not been able to reach essential agreements so that our public services are up to the task of those of us who make this land our home. At that crossroads, I remember my grandparents tending pumpkins, corn, and beans in the garden, while I, as a child, looked at the volcanoes and thought that I lived in the most beautiful and magical place in the world.
It must be said without whining, but with courage: we owe this landscape, first of all, to nature. However, it would be a serious lack of respect not to recognize the people who preceded us, who from sun to sun, stirred the badlands to extract sustenance with scarce water, the sailors who made the Atlantic their way of life, and those who sustained, with anonymous hands, the daily reproduction of island life. That social fabric gave meaning to the territory and elevated it to the category of landscape.
However, every founding myth, even the most fertile, has an expiration date if it is not cared for. Lanzarote was converted into an icon of difference and singularity, and that brand functioned as an economic and aesthetic lever. But it also inaugurated a dangerous drift: replacing the gaze with extraction. The landscape ceased to be a common good and became a resource subject to intensive exploitation. From the utopia of technological, scientific, and social progress, we went, without realizing it, to exceeding sustainable limits for a small island. Today we live with signs of saturation. We no longer live looking at the landscape, we live from it in the form of tourist, real estate, and symbolic extractivism.
This transition has profound implications. A territory that is reduced to merchandise loses the symbol. When everything is a showcase, civic sense weakens. And when civic sense weakens, priorities are distorted: inaccessible housing, pressure on public services, job insecurity, infrastructure congestion, kilometer-long queues to reach a point on
the island and loss of patience of a citizenry that is asked for infinite submission while profits are privatized and costs are socialized. The landscape, converted into a brand, runs the risk of becoming a mask or an empty shell.
I do not write this with a vocation of lament, but of diagnosis. The island has entered a new phase in which, if we do not make serious corrections, the story will look more like a science fiction dystopia than the island dreamed of by poets, artists, and thinkers. It is not an inevitable destiny. We are still in time to reorganize priorities and translate into concrete decisions what we repeat as a mantra: sustainability, limits, social justice, care for natural and cultural heritage. Proclamations are not enough. It is necessary to order flows, review load capacities, guarantee affordable housing, dignify salaries and working conditions, strengthen public transport, commit to a real energy transition, and legally protect common goods. All this requires planning, institutional courage, and a demanding citizenry.
It also needs a change of perspective. If the landscape is a cultural construction, it is time to reconstruct the way of looking at it. Heritage education, support for local research, protection of traditional knowledge, and neighborhood participation are not decorative additions. They are the condition for the territory to return to being a shared home and not a theme park. Looking at the landscape implies recognizing the limits of a finite island and the interdependence with other territories. It implies assuming that growth cannot be an end in itself. It implies, above all, placing life at the center.
I am left with a simple image. While the "old people" watered the small garden, I looked at the volcanoes and felt that we lived in a unique place. Today, that feeling has not been extinguished, but it demands responsibility. If we want those who come after and arrive on our island to continue saying "this island is my home", we must move from word to action. Thinking, researching, structuring, designing, and moving the island, yes, but we must have as a fundamental pillar: that the common good prevails over the greed of a few.
We are still in time, not to stop what cannot be stopped, but to redirect it. May the gaze return to settle the territory in the collective retina as a landscape and not as merchandise. May Lanzarote once again be the island where art, nature, and life meet, not the sad fable of an exhausted paradise. That is the course. The decision, as always, is in our hands.
J. David Machado Gutiérrez
Expert in Contemporary Culture