The Fondation Cesar Manrique

The decision to build his own home in the midst of a sea of lava was of major significance for Manrique. He was making a statement to refute the hurt that had been burning inside him since his days at university. Other students mocked him when said he was from Lanzarote telling him it was nothing but a heap of ashes.

"To me it was the most beautiful place on earth and I realised that had they seen the Island through my eyes they would have agreed with me. From then onwards I was determined to bring the beauty of Lanzarote to the attention of the whole world." Eventually, representatives of the major international architectural digests and homes magazines would arrive to wonder and then report on this house of unique beauty.

A home whose two levels are beyond what the most vivid imagination could have planned and landscaped with luxuriant sub-tropical foliage stands sited in the middle of an arid and lifeless stream of petrified lava. This is what the artist in Manrique had been aiming for. His home, Taro de Tahiche, serving as a microcosm of Lanzarote.

A seemingly barren island - a wasteland - the product of volcanic eruptions - was in reality a place of life and of beauty. At a time when visitors to the Island were counted in their hundreds, when it was not even on travel agency schedules as a destination, this man was gifted with vision.

He was further blessed with ability to encapsulate the singular beauty of Lanzarote for others to enjoy, foreseeing a time when hundreds of thousands possibly even millions would visit the isle of his birth.