"The time has come to stop," wrote the artist César Manrique in a manifesto in 1985; and the Canary Island of Lanzarote stopped. 2021 marked the 30th anniversary of the entry into force of its Insular Land Management Plan (PIOT), a pioneering legislation that for the first time put limits on urban growth in this fragile and beautiful land of volcanoes. At that time, they wanted to build hotel establishments throughout the island for about 300,000 beds, four times what there are today. However, a part of the population understood that the painter and sculptor Manrique was right when he began to ask for the protection of this desert landscape, previously considered barren and of little value. After mounting protests, finally,The Cabildo de Lanzarote went to look for the architect Fernando Prats —who had participated in the urban renovation of the Vallecas neighborhood in Madrid— with a very particular commission: a plan, not to erect more buildings, but to prevent so many from being built.
"They were magical years, a small utopia, the entire urban discipline was there to control growth, it was a revolution," recalls Prats (now 77 years old), who assures that as soon as he met Manrique, he connected with his ideas: "César does see to the people of the island the cultural loss that tourist banality can entail and proposes a different type of tourism. He is someone with enormous influence, even for his enemies. No mayor dares to say openly no, although the promoters get to work in a hurry ”.
Few times has a territory in Spain reflected more openly on its growth limits and its ecological carrying capacity. As Prats recounts, in those years it was even considered whether to take people from Lanzarote to other islands and they debated how to use the airport “as a tap for the island” to control the population. "The problem was what was not seen, we did a first outcrop work of what we wanted to urbanize and it was brutal: on an island of extreme fragility, 300,000 beds were being compromised," says the urban planner.
His strategy was to try to declassify any urban project that could be done before it was legally consolidated. The team assembled there by Prats manages to cancel a dozen partial plans without executing and erase 250,000 places for tourist accommodation from the urban planning forecasts. In addition, for the first time a ceiling of 110,000 places is put on the island and demanding requirements are introduced to increase the quality of tourism, such as the obligation of four stars for hotels and four keys for apartments. The entry into force of the PIOT in 1991 is decisive so that two years later the island as a whole is declared by UNESCO as a biosphere reserve.
"They have trained me to assemble, not to disassemble, but that was absolutely innovative, it required inventing many things, while still complying with the law," says Prats, who ended up resigning after a strong counteroffensive in the courts to his plan and the political change on the island.
Three decades after Lanzarote activated the brake, although urbanized areas have continued to expand and huge corruption scandals have broken out with numerous breaches of that island plan, cement has not grown as much as expected in those years and has concentrated, on all in existing urban centers. However, the vision of the environmental limits of the territories has also evolved. "That plan was aimed at avoiding a suicidal overflow, now the problem is dependence on the outside," highlights the architect. "Before all local politics were made through urban plans, but the problem is no longer only urban growth, now the stake is much greater, since we must face the climate crisis or loss of biodiversity," he says.
Today the challenge goes beyond urban planning: the current footprint of the island
To really assess where this island is with respect to its limits nowadays it is no longer enough to look at the urban planning or the state of conservation of the landscape.
Today, the footprint of this territory is triggered above all by its dependence on the outside, as can be seen in this representation of the functioning of Lanzarote considering the flows related to hydrocarbons, electricity, water, food and waste.
For Dolores Corujo, current president of the Cabildo, the island administration, "the Lanzarote we know would not exist without the 1991 Insular Plan." “It would be unrecognizable, because the previous planning allowed to build half a million tourist beds. Just think that 25,000 tourist beds were going to be built on the island of La Graciosa alone and in a place as emblematic as the beaches of Caletón Blanco, almost 10,000 ″, comments the representative from Lanzarote, who highlights the decisive role of two people in stopping this tsunami of cement: the urban planner Fernando Prats and the politician Enrique Pérez Parrilla, a Canarian leader who died in 2020 who was president of the Cabildo in the years in which the PIOT was launched.
Regarding the current environmental limits of the island, Corujo considers that the most important lesson of those years was learning to distinguish between growth and development: "Establishing limits to growth does not in any way mean stopping development, quite the contrary." The president of the Cabildo de Lanzarote agrees on the need to decarbonize the economy to fight against global warming, although she does not question the development model based on the transfer of tourists by plane to the island. “Tourism will always have an important weight in our economy and tourism inevitably implies air mobility. Technological improvements will have to be combined with emission compensation or CO₂ reduction strategies,But thinking of the Canary Islands without tourism having a prominent role in its economy is simply impossible ”, he emphasizes.
The fight against climate change and the need to eliminate CO₂ emissions in the coming decades makes it necessary to rethink the operating schemes of all inhabited territories. This is even more complex in isolated places such as islands and becomes a real environmental puzzle in areas of particular fragility and scarcity of their own resources, as is the case in Lanzarote. At this point, there is a trend that considers that it is no longer worth stopping growth and that the richest countries should choose to decrease. For Quino Miguélez, a technician at the Lanzarote Biosphere Reserve Office, the island should be a laboratory where to test alternatives to make human development compatible with environmental protection. "Lanzarote can be an example for the world:Humanity does not understand that there are limits and that we cannot separate ourselves from nature ”, he emphasizes.
'Moment to stop', manifesto by César Manrique (1985)
Reaching the goal of utopia is achieving the impossible. Utopia can be a reality when the soul manifests turning with record-jumping enthusiasm to achieve that uniqueness of creation. The fullness of knowing how to give that harmonic conjunction, only achieved by the intelligence of an intuitive instinct that not even man himself can control through that apparent established logic, is what can fully satisfy the ability to create. By prophecy of fate, the miracle of utopia was achieved on the island of Lanzarote. The people of Lanzarote have achieved for the first time in their history a general sense of aesthetic concepts, for their exemplary works. Its unusual nature, through a new aesthetic sense, has been achieved by a new concept of Art with a deep didactic sense.Thus it has come, by that anthropological understanding of a general vision, to the full acceptance of the care of beauty, its architecture and its spaces. On another level, the people of Lanzarote have entered something that they have never dared to use: the force of self-determination and solidarity, as they begin to realize the destruction of their harmony, their environment and their identity. What cannot really be believed is that, after the miracle of harmonic unity was achieved on the island of Lanzarote, and this new Nature-Art concept, it has not been understood at all and without the slightest vision of the future, what could have been his bright future. Had we understood it, we could have set an example worldwide with pride and permanent wealth, and the suicide we are causing would not occur,by a clumsy selfishness without limits. What is truly dramatic is that after the efforts and works carried out with an overflowing enthusiasm of love and understanding of the enormous hidden and uncategorized beauty of our volcanology, to elevate it to the highest level, a series of "characters" now emerge with the solo purpose of exploiting that prestige achieved by our people, regardless of the ruin of the island, exterminating, in the slightest time, the legacy of hundreds of millennia of volcanological and geological evolution. The question: Who are responsible? We believe that any government has the obligation to take care of the space that serves us for the development of our lives, of education and culture, of our wealth and, above all, of the “permanence of that wealth”. We are always hearing apologiesinconveniences, previous approvals, expired laws and a myriad of apparent setbacks that seem impossible to correct, as long as we do not stop this barbarity that is thrown at us. Everything can be corrected. It depends on enthusiasm, on having a truth in your hands and a brave and honest decision. The only drawback, and everyone already knows that, is a matter of buying and selling. Would we have hope? Can we save what we have left? Is it a matter of smart vision? I believe that the case could not be more evident, blatant and elementary to realize that the time has come to STOP.to have a truth in your hands and a brave and honest decision. The only drawback, and everyone already knows that, is a matter of buying and selling. Would we have hope? Can we save what we have left? Is it a matter of smart vision? I believe that the case could not be more evident, blatant and elementary to realize that the time has come to STOP.to have a truth in your hands and a brave and honest decision. The only drawback, and everyone already knows that, is a matter of buying and selling. Would we have hope? Can we save what we have left? Is it a matter of smart vision? I believe that the case could not be more evident, blatant and elementary to realize that the time has come to STOP.
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