Lanzarote does not look like other holiday islands, and that is not luck. It is the result of decisions taken decades ago, when this island was poor and could have sold itself to anyone.
In the 1960s and 70s, as concrete towers rose along coastlines all over southern Europe, Lanzarote decided to do the opposite. Buildings were kept low and white. Advertising billboards were banned from the roads. Power lines were buried. Traditional colours — green woodwork inland, blue on the coast — were protected by rule, not by nostalgia. The artist César Manrique campaigned for this with an obstinacy that made him enemies, and won. In 1993 UNESCO declared the entire island a Biosphere Reserve.
The protection is real and it has teeth. Timanfaya National Park, created in 1974, can only be crossed by the official route: walking freely across those lava fields is forbidden, because a footprint in fresh-looking lichen can take decades to fade. To the north, around La Graciosa and the islets, lies one of Europe's largest marine reserves. Whole stretches of coast have no buildings at all.
Water is the island's quiet miracle. With barely any rainfall and not one permanent river, Lanzarote lived for centuries on rain collected from rooftops into underground cisterns, and it now drinks mostly from the sea, through desalination. Nothing that comes out of a tap here arrives cheaply, in energy or in money.
None of this survives on its own. A few things visitors do make a real difference: stay on marked paths and roads in the protected areas; take no lava stones, sand or shells home, however small — it is a fine, and multiplied by millions of visitors it is a landscape; carry your plastic back out with you, because what blows off a beach ends up in the reserve; give the sea life room, and never touch or feed it; use water as if it were expensive, which it is.
An island this dry has no margin for error. The reason it still looks like this is that, for sixty years, enough people decided it should.