Jameos del Agua, the blind crab that lives nowhere else

A jameo is the gap left when the roof of a lava tube collapses. The Corona volcano, in the north of the island, left several: in one of them, in 1966, César Manrique opened the first of the centres that would change how Lanzarote is visited.

He did not build a building. He went down into the cavity and left it almost as it was: the stone staircase, the palms, the white pool cut against black basalt. Concerts are heard in an auditorium carved out of the cave, where sound rebounds off poured rock.

The resident nobody expects

In the inner lake, fed by seawater filtering through the rock, live tiny white blind crabs: Munidopsis polymorpha, known locally as jameítos. They exist nowhere else on Earth. They are so fragile that a single coin thrown into the water can poison them, which is why the signs are everywhere.

Reach it from Haría, on the Órzola road. The Casa de los Volcanes, the volcanology research centre in the deepest part of the tube, is worth the visit too.

Sources: Centros de Arte, Cultura y Turismo del Cabildo de Lanzarote; Casa de los Volcanes.