La Madriguera, the Arrecife burrow where books get a third life

At the end of the pedestrian street Antonio Porlier y Sopranis, where Arrecife stops being a city you pass through and turns back into a village, there is a door that does not look like a shop. Inside: a corridor with a chequerboard floor and a row of alcoves. This is La Madriguera — the burrow. The name is exact.

A philosopher who gave up the kitchen

It is kept by Alexis de la Cruz Otero, a Madrileño who stayed on Lanzarote. He read Philosophy at La Laguna and spent five years cooking at bar La Bulla, down in El Charco. Then a trip to Las Palmas, a couple of second-hand bookshops glimpsed in passing, and a month and a half later he opened. That was 27 July 2019: the island's first shop buying and selling used books.

He describes himself in a way anyone who has been inside will recognise: he acts as «a psychologist» for the people who come through the door. The image he uses for his own life is a haiku by Taneda Santōka, the wandering Japanese monk: the beggar's bowl that catches the falling leaves. «It sums up my life in the Madriguera». He is also a poet — Eclipse de girasol, Pandemia a corazón abierto (Ediciones Remotas, 2025).

What it looks like inside

The interior is by Yurima Hernández and resembles no other bookshop on the island. There is a section framed in violet for feminist writing. There is a salvaged and restored stained-glass panel given over to poetry. There is a psychoanalysis corner with a couch — a joke, and at the same time an invitation to sit down. There is an alcove of foreign literature and a jolatero, a tin, for Canarian texts. And there are the vintage crates with books thrown in loose: those are for rummaging, which is half the pleasure.

What you will find

The stated trade is «giving books a third, even a fourth life», so they do not end up in a skip. They arrive through customers' donations, through inheritances, through house moves, through institutions. The best sellers are crime novels and self-help, but the real interest lies elsewhere.

Alexis's speciality is Canarian literature, and it is why this shop matters. On the shelves: Leandro Perdomo and Ángel Guerra, books on the archipelago's flora and fauna, children's stories on Canarian themes, and a set of twenty-seven volumes of José Martí that came from Havana. Things the chains do not stock, and that usually go to the tip when a house is cleared.

For English readers: there is a whole bookcase of English titles, plus a few shelves in other languages. It is one of the few places of its kind in Arrecife — the island's other English-language books are in Puerto del Carmen, Playa Blanca and Playa Honda.

The «literary tinders»

The best idea in the house: books wrapped, so you cannot see them, with only a few clues written on the outside. The genre, a line, an adjective. You pay a token amount and unwrap it at home. He calls them tinders literarios, blind dates with a book, and has run them since he opened. One variation, la hora del té, added a teabag to the parcel.

You can bring your own

He buys as well as sells: if you have boxes of books with nowhere to go, that is the address. Ask about the exact terms on the spot — they depend on the book.

There is a shelf that says ITALIANO

Written in marker pen on the shelf itself, among the stacks, is the word ITALIANO. Underneath: Dumas and Dostoevsky in yellowed paperbacks, Camilleri, Erri De Luca, Mann, Hemingway, Fabio Volo, the white-spined Einaudis. It is the kind of shelf that assembles itself, left behind by the Italians who leave and carried in by the ones who stay.

Finding it

La Madriguera — Calle Antonio Porlier y Sopranis 6, Arrecife, in the pedestrian area of the Bulevar Spínola. At the top of the street stands the statue of Dr José Molina Orosa; turn left up calle Fajardo for the Archaeological Museum.
Hours: Monday to Friday 10:00–13:30 and 17:00–20:00, Saturday 10:00–13:30, closed Sunday.
Phone 679 437 182 · Instagram @libreria_lamadriguera.

The hours are the ones written by hand on the shop window.