A hundred years ago, Benito Pérez Armas wrote about Lanzarote:
"Whoever has not seen that immense wasteland of wild, ferocious, truculent lava cannot have an idea of the horrors of a landscape where everything is the color of a crow's wing and a flower has never been born... When faced with such a panorama, the nerves are strained as if on the edge of an abyss. That is Nature dead and dressed in mourning. Whoever has the heart of an artist passes through those places, silent, sad and possessed of that fearful respect that is experienced in the presence of a coffin covered with funereal crepe."
Benito was born in Yaiza in 1871, and it is not that he did not love his island. But neither he nor his contemporaries saw it as we see it today. It took a few decades for a unique generation of artists and intellectuals, with César Manrique as the main reference, to transform "the horrors of that landscape" into genuine beauty, worthy of pride and true appreciation.
The magic of what they did consisted not so much in the changes they made on the ground, as in the changes they introduced into the minds of the people.
They looked at Lanzarote in a different way, and taught the rest of us to look at it in the same way. What until then had been a poor, dry island, lacking in attractions, dead and sad nature, barely worthy of a visit and from which whoever could fled as soon as the opportunity arose, became something else, overnight.
They knew how to see the potential of what was here and through them Lanzarote was transformed, without ceasing to be what it had always been. They told us: this is not death, this is life; This is not sad, it is happy; This is not horrifying, it is extraordinarily beautiful. They told us and they showed us. And we believed it. And we knew it.
Now look at Arrecife. When I walk through Arrecife I can't stop thinking about what I've told you. We have grown and lived here under the conviction that Arrecife is an ugly city. A neglected and chaotic place that we try to hide from our visitors.
But what if someone convinced us that Arrecife is much more? What if they showed us all the potential of this place? What if we looked at the capital not as it is now, but as it could be? What if we appreciated what we despise today and in each of its corners, today abandoned and ruined, we imagined the beauty that lies behind the neglect?
As they did long ago with Lanzarote, it is not so much about changing the place, as about changing the way those of us who live there look at it. The day we visualize the Arrecife that is already there, under the disorder and the dirt, that day Arrecife will be something else, even before we change a single element on the ground.
By Fernando Marcet Manrique
