Lanzarote: el papel de la crisis - Fundación César Manrique

decision-taking, normally outside the range of scientific rationality, the only way is to
establish an institutional framework geared towards informing and increasing the awareness
of all parties involved, while encouraging them to play their part. Participation is a
fundamental stage in the encounter between unitary purposes and the ethical and aesthetic
criteria forgotten in standard economic discourse.
Nevertheless, in the era of the “single thought” and dominant capitalist “globalisation”, can
a tiny island successfully assert its own personality and its desire to reconcile lucrative
purposes with certain, specific, utilitarian objectives concerning environmental quality,
territorial aesthetics... or cohabitation? In the case of Lanzarote, dependence on tourism is
also an obstacle to the voluntary isolation which the conservation of specific forms of life
and management would seem to require. Thus, it is not a question of building a utopia
outside the present world but within its own dominions.
The selfsame economic advantage provided by the island’s touristic appeal is also the main
disadvantage when it comes to its conservation and improvement: the desire to exploit that
appeal easily leads to its deterioration. Natural spaces of interest have first attracted the
sensitive spirit. But, in the wake of writers and artists who, like radio transmitters, are the
first to appreciate that appeal, come legions of tourists who, between them, contribute to
its degradation. The spiral of speculation and the mass use of these spaces is detrimental to
their scenic value and subjects them to the stress, amassment and congestion characteristic
of city life. As a result, save for the cases in which, with a rare sensitiveness, a happy medium
has been struck between the use of a territory for tourism and habitation on the one hand
and the conservation of its original values on the other, the deterioration of the habitability
of towns and cities has been projected to all points of the compass by mass tourism.
Lanzarote’s main economic task consists of channelling and constraining the expansion of
the tourist trade, which is threatening, as lava did in the past, to ravage the island’s territory
and wipe out all the features peculiar to its own life. And when individual behaviour patterns
bring unwanted collective consequences, the scale of reasoning must be extended so as to
include and remedy them: in the case in question, reasoning should be focused on the
touristic project of the island as a whole, with intelligent discussions about its dimension
and orientation. The management of a winecellar illustrates the alternative facing
Lanzarote’s tourism industry: maintain high quality through limited production or increase
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