Lanzarote beyond the beach

The first term of the school year is the longest; by October, children - and parents - are ready for some fun.  And this is a great time to travel to Lanzarote.  The flight time is 4 hours from Bournemouth and the Canary Islands are Europe's most reliable options for winter sun, rarely dipping far below 20 degrees.  The fourth biggest and easternmost member of the group, Lanzarote with its dramatic volcanic landscape has plenty of scope for adventures.  Were Lanzarote a woman, she'd be feisty and combustible.  The smallest of the four main Canary Islands is dubbed the Hawaii of Europe.

The view, as you fly into Lanzarote, is unusual.  It's not white sand and sunburnt hills: it looks black, almost dirty.  Closer to land, the earth is shattered, roads winding between dark rocks.  The rubble appears freshly churned.  If you didn't know better, you could see it as ugly; slag-heaps or building sites.  But in fact it's the remnants of a huge, devastating volcanic eruption that scoured the island between 1730 and 1736.  It is a spectacular reminder of the power of the Earth.  The idea was to see if the grandchildren, who are aged 6 and 4, would appreciate seeing that power close up, and learn something from it.  It would be a sort of bucket-and-spade holiday with added educational value.

Lanzarote was occasionally nicknamed "Lanzagrotty".  It still has architectural lapses, but overall it is a buzzing place with a long, tiled promenade.  Great for riding a Flintstone's bike.

On our first day we basked on the beach of this volcanic beauty - settled by the Berbers, plundered by pirates and conquered by the Spanish in 1402 before a devasating series of eruptions created its extraordinary lunar landscape but to simply  just bask on the beaches would be a terrible waste.

The island has the colour and texture of elephant hide, humped, wrinkled, occasionally bristled, sometimes covered in different - coloured dust where the elephant has rolled.  The villages are splodges of spilt white paint nestling in folds in the elephant's skin.   The island is not big - 37 miles long by 12 miles wide.

The big draw is the Timanfaya National Park, so the next day we set off for Timanfaya, a national park centred around the volcanoes that were most active in the 1730 event.  We chose to go on an organised tour, which was a double decker coach and Phil and I were lucky to manage to sit upstairs on the front seats with a magnificent view.  Some people however do the trip on a camel!

With its mischievous symbol of El Diablo at the entrance, this feels like a trip to Hell.  So into the mouth of hell on a tour of the volcanic side of this Island with the grandchildren!!!!!!!  Certainly former residents of the villages around Timanfaya National Park - known as the Mountains of Fire - would have thought so when between 1730 and 1736 more than 100 volcanoes erupted violently and continuously.  Islanders still give thanks to the Lady of Sorrows, or the Virgin of the Volcanoes, every September for stopping the lava from destroying the village of Yaiza.

At the visitor centre, a guide poured water into a borehole where the geothermal heat blasted it up as a geyser, slightly scaring both children and me; another held dry wood down in a pit where the heat of the volcano set it alight, Chloe was impressed.  But what was more impressive was the chicken cooking on spits over a volcanic pit, and the heat you could feel when you put your hands on the ground.

We then boarded our coach for a tour around this weird landscape (it's not a coincidence that Lanzarote has been used as the location for several sci-fi and fantasy films, including One Million Years BC).  It's often described as "lunar", but it's not.  It's Martian.  Looking out from the window of the bus, the images are amazingly reminiscent of the images sent back by the Mars Curiosity rover: broken land and rusted, iron-red earth.

The drive is bizarre.  The Timanfaya eruptions covered a quarter of Lanzarote in lava, burying 11 villages and forcing the entire population to flee.  To this day the heat of the ground and the sulphurous chemicals render it almost devoid of life; there are small bushes and lichens, but even three centuries later there are no grasses or forests.

The coach takes terrifying hairpin bends through the broken hills, stopping periodically for its three-language audio tour to tell you about some notable hill or local legend.  Chloe and Jamie both enjoyed it and I am sure they learnt something about volcanoes.

The rest of the holiday was spent unwinding and allowing the holiday to do what it should - recharge the batteries.  Unfortunately, we were spectacularly unlucky with the weather - usually in October you can expect 25 C daily and three days of rain a month.  However, one day we had a year's rainfall.
But we still had fun - we all enjoyed a game of ten pin bowling, especially Caroline who won.  Phil still can't understand why he lost when he had three strikes and Chloe and Jamie enjoyed the Kids Club with its Playpit.

However, the rest of the week was sunny and we made full use of the pool and Chloe learnt how to play Chess (sometimes to her own rules but hey).

The Canary Islands were once famous for their wine.  In the 16th century "Canary wine", made from the malvasia grape, was favoured by European royalty and soon became so popular that it provided the islands with their main source of income.  William Shakespeare supposedly began to accept barrels of the stuff as payment for his work, and his characters thought things were remiss when they lacked a "cup of Canary".

So in the spirit of selfless public service, I have checked out some wines.  In the past, tourists only cared for chips and the sun but times are changing.  Now people want good food and wine.  Most of the bodesgas produce a Malvasia that Shakespeare would recognise, a very drinkable dry white wine that has a relatively high alcohol content and must be drunk young.  Some people say they really can "taste the lava", I, however, could not.  But it was top notch.  I'm missing the stuff already.

Whilst Chloe and Jamie checked out the desserts.

We were also fortunate to watch Spain's famous Eagle Patrol, Patrulla Aguila, perform two air displays.  One on the Wednesday for a practice and one on the Sunday to celebrate 600 years of La Villa de Teguise being founded as the capital of The Canary Islands in 1418.  There were seven Aviojet aircraft.  They did not disappoint.  The display included skillfull pirouttes and fly bys and innovative manoeuvres such as inverted looping and the corkscrew.  Jamie was extremely impressed.

The whole holiday was a spectacular success if rather tiring.