The teleclubs, where the island has gathered for sixty years

In the 1960s the Spanish Ministry of Information and Tourism funded a network of communal rooms in villages: they were called teleclubs, and they grew up around the village's only television set. People went in the evening, all together, because there was no TV at home.

Television later reached every living room and the teleclubs should have disappeared. On Lanzarote a good number survived, turned into bars and social centres run by the village itself.

Why it is worth going in

They are where you drink a barraquito mid-morning and eat a single dish, with no menu and no English. During the patron saint festivals they become the village headquarters.

They have no eye-catching signs and no opening hours on a website: you go past and see whether the door is open. That is precisely what makes them unlike any bar on the tourist coast.

Sources: Programa de teleclubs del Ministerio de Información y Turismo (1964); ayuntamientos de Lanzarote.