Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 2
·
November 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
28
that the capital offers to the visitor a vibrant atmosphere which is otherwise lacking
elsewhere. It is, however, worth mentioning that villages like Haría, Mancha Blanca, San
Bartolomé and Yaiza perfectly portray that image of Lanzarote that has been built up through
place-branding and that makes Lanzarote a desirable travel destination.
Another interesting example is that of the Marina Rubicón settlement, once a fishing
community about 4 km from the bigger village of Playa Blanca, now completely renovated
and turned into a marina for tourists’ boats and yachts. In the surroundings of the Marina and
its harbour it is possible to find mainly restaurants, bars, souvenir shops, some doctor/dentist
practices, one supermarket and various designers’ and duty-free shops. Hotels and resorts are
also situated nearby, but what attracts attention is the almost total lack of housing facilities not
dedicated to tourism. The result is a rather weird feeling: the streets are empty and quiet,
many shops are for rent or just closed, just a few tourists occasionally passing by on the
promenade – both by day and at night. Marina Rubicón looks just like one of those
reproductions of Wild West ghost towns that can be found in theme parks. It was built
following the directions given by Manrique as it displays the original and traditional
architecture, and for these same reasons it is missing its target of being authentic: Marina
Rubicón is not ‘alive’, it doesn’t have inhabitants, but only workers, which come and go like
cinema extras. In its aesthetic perfection it is comparable to a
non-place
.
The figure of Manrique is, then, hard to define unambiguously and he himself was
against being labelled in any way: being architect, painter, sculptor, gardener, artisan and in
some way a visionary, in the end he turned Lanzarote into what he called an
obra total
, a total
artwork, that is the integrated product of different forms of art (Zamora Cabrera 2009: 58-59),
but also to the extent that due to its particular geological conformation which influenced every
aspect of the culture, each feature of the Island could virtually be perceived as a “natural work
of art”, thanks to its intrinsic aesthetic qualities.
Nevertheless, as Javier Durán maintains, Manrique was not the only one who had the
authority to decide the fate of the rising tourist industry, but he had a more important faculty:
‘the assumption of authorship and, as a consequence of that, the fusion of the progress of the
Island with a name and the use of this name to promote this model. Without this overlap,
nothing in Lanzarote would have been the same’( de Santa Ana 2004: 115; my translation).
7
According to M. A. Perdomo, tourism expanded mainly thanks to the aesthetic image
that was created for it, to the extent that Lanzarote started becoming popular for the great care
that had been put into adapting the tourist infrastructures to the architectonic conditions and to
its environment (Perdomo 1987: 442). The work of Manrique is particularly appreciated
because he managed to substitute the lack of regulations in the question of building and soil
usage with an aesthetic plan that avoided the realization of those
pastiches neocanarios
,
which are so deplorable on other islands, as well as the unregulated expansion of tourist
infrastructures, thus preserving the original character of Lanzarote.
7
The original reads, (‘La asunción de la autoría y, como consecuencia de ello, la fusión del progreso
insular con un nombre y la utilisación del nombre para promover el modelo. Sin este solapamiento
nada en Lanzarote hubiese sido igual.’
