Lanzarote: el papel de la crisis - Fundación César Manrique

1 Majos. La primitiva población de
Lanzarote, José C. Cabrera
Pérez and others. Fundación
César Manrique. 1999.
2 Attributed to Angelino Dubert in
1339, according to J.C. Cabrera
and others (op.cit.).
LANZAROTE: A HANDSOME AIRCRAFT
CARRIER SET ATILT BY ITS CONTAMINATING CARGO
Alfonso del Val
Lanzarote is a whole resting on the Atlantic, easy to seize because of its accessible
position, size and relief. The island’s evolution from what, for us, is antiquity, prehistory...,
is as little known as it is surprising. As far back as the early fourteenth century, when it
was rediscovered by the first tourist-adventurer, the Genoese Lancelott Malocello, it lost
its name. “From the dissemination of the portulan chart, such would be the first image and
the first name by which Europe would know this island” 1 . This image, however, would be
enhanced by the first map2 , which was certainly more accurate than the ones that had
perhaps been the product of Pliny’s and Ptolemy’s dreams. We know little of the effects of
that outside awareness of the island on the scant population of 1,000 or possibly 3,000
majos, but the idea that its rediscovery in the Middle Ages led to the first crisis of an
external origin, affecting the balance between resources and population and, accordingly,
waste, now a valuable source of archaeological and anthropological information, is an
acceptable hypothesis.
On an expanse of 84,500 hectares, the various populations of the ínsula de Lancelott must
have endeavoured to evolve from the ever more difficult balance between maximum
productive diversification and minimum vulnerability on the one hand and between the
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