Idea for April 2026: César Manrique

My idea of the month is actually a person: the Spanish designer, painter, environmentalist, urbanist and hedonist, César Manrique.

Born in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands in 1919, he lived and worked in Madrid and New York before returning home. He saw that Lanzarote would need tourism, but wanted to save the island from the excesses of high-rise development - and he succeeded.

Years ahead of his time, all his work is about the interdependency of humanity and nature. He built a house like something from James Bond or Thunderbirds. (The scene, we gather, of lots of outrageous parties.) He created an astonishing cactus garden. He beautified roundabouts with giant sculptures, and he built a (fake) fisherman’s village, a kind of Canarian Portmeirion. The island really is his work.

And we stayed in a hotel he created, with his architect friend Fernando Higueras. A very early example of eco-brutalism - a concrete ziggurat structure much like Lasdun’s work at the University of East Anglia, but with dangling greenery everywhere, and palm trees in the middle. Plus these massive murals.