Casa Museo del Campesino reopens with a new guided and self-guided route

The Casa Museo del Campesino is open again. Lanzarote's Centros de Arte, Cultura y Turismo (CACT) have reopened the sculptural and architectural complex that Cesar Manrique built at the geographic centre of the island, with a reworked reading of the site and the landscape around it.

The clearest change is in how you visit. The route can be followed with a team of on-site information staff or on your own, using QR codes placed along the way. The interactive self-guide can be downloaded from the official CACT website. The narrative brings together architecture, identity, the primary sector and community, the four pillars the organisation uses across its sites.

Everything revolves around the Escultura de la Fecundidad, which rises on the Pena de Tajaste as a tribute to the men and women who worked this land in extreme conditions: scarce water, constant wind and volcanic soil that looked impossible to farm.

Along the walk visitors find elements of traditional rural life: the era threshing floor, the aljibe water cistern, the camel saddle and the seron, the hollow container that was filled with sand or other materials. Tools and implements, but also the customs of a farming community.

Angel Vazquez, councillor for the organisation, encouraged residents and visitors to walk the new route. The place, he said, "reflects what we were in order to explain what we are", and the route shows "tools, implements, uses and customs, but it is also collective effort, work, perseverance and identity, elements that reveal a new way of looking at and understanding Lanzarote".

The stop that makes sense of La Geria

For many travellers the Casa Museo del Campesino has been a quick coffee stop on the way to La Geria or the north. The new layout makes it worth a proper visit: half an hour here explains where the hoyos, the dry stone walls and the enarenados of volcanic gravel come from, and why the island's farmland looks the way it does. If you plan to use the self-guide, download the content before you set off, as mobile coverage inland can be patchy.