Lanzarote
in Canary Islands

The other Canary Islands have beaches. Lanzarote has those too, but it also has something stranger and harder to categorise: a volcanic landscape of black lava fields, fire mountains, and wine-growing craters that looks like it arrived from somewhere else entirely. The artist César Manrique spent much of his life here turning the island's architecture into an extension of its geology, and his fingerprints are everywhere from the Jameos del Agua to the whitewashed villages with their distinctive green shutters. The Malvasia wine grown in the La Geria valley, each vine sheltered in its own volcanic hollow, is worth serious attention. An island that rewards curiosity well beyond the sun lounger.