Lanzarote's Volcanic Landscape and Culture

For the past few days we've been staying in a marina on the island of Lanzarote in the Canaries. Two days ago, we rented a car and drove to the other side of the island and watched huge waves crash on the black and red rocks. First of all, driving was very odd for quite a few reasons. After riding on Sila for months without getting in a car, climbing into a car and riding in one are both weird. Sila typically goes about seven knots (just over 8 mph). Therefore, going 60 kilometers per hour feels weird (plus it is a whole other unit of measurement to keep track of!). Once we got to the shore, the crashing waves were beautiful. Not only because of the flash of a rainbow when spray flew, but also because the waves turned a light blue color as they crashed. After every wave, huge jets of water leapt upwards off the rocks.

On the way across the island, we drove through a very strange landscape. Outside of people's houses, there were fields covered in very small black pebbles. Around each field, there was a rock wall that was about two feet tall, clearly built from the rocks sifted out of the field. My mom told me that the fences were a little like New England that way.  Since there was nothing green in sight, we could not figure out why the fields were so carefully tended.

 

There were also fields filled with small pits. There were hundreds of these pits, each about five feet in diameter and shaped like an inverted cone. I even thought the whole field looked like upside down moguls because some of these fields were on the side of a steep hill.  Each pit had a small, one foot high rock wall on the windward side only. At the bottom of each pit, there was one small bush-like plant.  Just thinking about building all of this made me tired. The only good news is that once the pits are built, they probably work for many years.

In the car, we listened to a CD that told us about Lanzarote. When it got to Agriculture we all leaned in to learn more about what we had just seen. Lanzarote is a desert so there is very little rainfall each year, which means the farmers had to come up with a way to help their plants survive in these conditions. The black pebbles we saw in the fields were actually volcanic ash that the farmers had spread. The ash holds water longer than other kinds of soil, helps to maintain a constant temperature, and provides a good source of nutrients. The pits also had the ash. The pit and the windbreak protect the plant from the wind until it is strong enough to not get ripped out of the ground by the wind. The pit has the added bonus of funneling water to the plant. As it turns out, the plants in the bottom of the pit are grapevines- part of the vineyards on Lanzarote. My mom tells me that the white wine made here is very good.

We left the shoreline and we drove towards a volcanic vent to go for a short hike. On this island there are about a dozen different vents. In other words, there are about a dozen volcanoes that all explode at once and the island is one big magma tank.  It seems scary, except that the volcanoes haven't gone off since 1759. Wow, if it's still active they will explode eventually, the clock is ticking. Jack disagreed and said, "It's been so long it probably won't explode while we are here." I just said, "All the more likely it's going to explode on our visit." (To which I got an eye roll from Mama and Jack).

The hill sides were entirely red or entirely black. One of the signs on the trail said that the red rock was created when the lava had more oxygenated iron. If it was black, then too little iron or too little oxygen got caught in the lava flow. There were nearly impassable fields that stretched as far as one could see. They were filled with lava rocks shaped in every different way imaginable, including some that were like spikes and others that were round. The round ones surprised me because I did not think that lava would solidify in the shape of a sphere.

Another cool thing I learned was that lichen is the first to grow in a lava field after an explosion. I could see the sign wasn't lying because there was two inch tall lichen on every single rock I saw. I would bet a million dollars that someone couldn't find a rock that was bigger than a loaf of bread but had no lichen on it.

Mama said, "This place looks like a combination of Wyoming and Hawaii." If you were to visit Lanzarote you would see why. Anyone who has been to the big island of Hawaii or Wyoming knows that the two states have little in common. Wyoming is a desert. Hawaii is a volcanic island with old lava flows and many of the same features as Lanzarote, however, Hawaii gets a lot more rain so there are parts of the big island that are more like a rain forest. Like Wyoming, the ground is dry in Lanzarote. There are very few plants but a humid ocean breeze sweeps the island. It is a strange combination.

Yesterday we went to a lava tube that is actually a huge cave created by multiple volcanic explosions. Thankfully, there were lights installed in the cave that made it easy to see where we were going. I quickly noticed that the cave was about twenty meters tall, and ten meters wide, which seemed pretty big. As we walked through I noticed beautiful colors and shapes of the volcanic rocks all around us. The guide told and showed us many cool things. For example, people hid from pirates in this cave. He also pointed out many different kinds of rocks and their formations.

There were two cool yet frightening things in the cave. Have you ever felt like you shouldn't be so high up or so low down? That's exactly how I felt when we were walking along the edge of a huge drop that went deeper into the cave. I hate heights. I also don't feel too great about being underground so being above a huge drop and being underground made me uncomfortable.

Part way through the cave the guide told us to stop, and he walked ahead. After a moment he beckoned us over to where he was standing. When I got there, I looked down. In front of me was a huge hole. I was at first scared of the huge height. But then with a rush that feeling disappeared. The hole didn't look quite right. For one, there was no handrail in front of me, like there had been at the other drop. A moment more of looking and I glanced up at the ceiling and saw that it mirrored the bottom of the pit… SPLASH the guide threw a rock into the pit. The pit was not a pit but was water and the smooth surface had tricked me with its beautiful reflection. This explained why it hadn't bothered me with its fake heights. The water was no deeper than two or three inches.

The reflection on the water in the lava tube

Today, we hiked around a huge crater. The volcanic formations, the new perspective, and the beauty of the view from so high up were incredible. The explosion that created this particular crater happened before the 1759 explosion. I could tell that the eruption was a big one because the crater was gigantic. It took an hour of steady walking (not including eating lunch, stopping to look at views and take pictures, and climbing up to the top) to walk around the rim . The crater was a huge circular ridge. One side was a lot larger than the others. The outside was pretty steep but the trail crossed it at an angle. The inside was an even steeper hillside. At the bottom of the cliffs on the inside the ground probably slanted in towards the center of the crater (from so high up it was hard to be certain). In the middle there was a little circle of plants. A ton of water would run down there if it rained. That's a pretty nice place to be if you are a plant in a desert. From the top of the crater I really got an idea of how the lava from the 1759 explosion flowed. The lava rocks took up even more space than I had originally thought, taking up the entire side of the island.  When we were almost at the summit, or high point of the crater, I caught a glimpse of the lava rock field and literally thought it was the ocean. The rock with the sun on it wasn't quite the right color to be the ocean but it was still beautiful.

Approaching the summit

All in all, our trip to Lanzarote has been fabulous, amazing, and a great learning experience.–Porter