Lanzarote is small, but its census is a map of the world. Just over 163,000 people live here — and one in four holds a foreign passport: the highest proportion in the Canaries. The seventh-generation Canarian with a Norman surname lives alongside the mainland family that arrived with the tourism boom, a surprisingly large Italian community, Britons and Irish in love with the climate, and neighbours from Colombia, Morocco, China and half the world besides. Add to them some three million visitors a year — British nearly half, followed by Germans, Irish, French and mainland Spaniards. Result: for every resident, around 18 tourists pass through each year. And yet the island still feels like an island: that balance is its true miracle.
Let's start with the numbers, which tell a story in themselves. Lanzarote closed 2024 with some 163,000 inhabitants — and it is adding around five thousand a year, one of the fastest growth rates in Spain. Half a century ago it didn't reach 50,000: the island has tripled its population in two generations, a social change of an intensity few European communities have lived through. The engine is well known — tourism and everything it pulls along behind it — but the result is more interesting than the cause: one of the most international censuses in the country, with around a quarter of residents holding foreign nationality, the highest percentage in the archipelago.
Who are today's Lanzaroteños? First, the ones who were always here: the Canarian families whose surnames tell the island's history — Betancort and Perdomo of Norman and Portuguese root, Cabrera, Curbelo, de León — heirs of Majos, conquerors, settlers and of those emigrants who went to Cuba, Venezuela or Uruguay and came back (or didn't: half the island has cousins in the Americas — emigration driven by hunger and thirst is a central part of local memory). Second, the mainlanders who arrived from the seventies onwards with tourism development. And third, the international mosaic: the Italian community — one of the largest, with a notable presence in hospitality —, resident Britons and Irish, Germans, and growing communities from Colombia, Morocco, China, India and West Africa. The island's classrooms count dozens of nationalities; in the markets, the accents take it in turns.
Then there is the second population: the floating one. Some three million tourists visit Lanzarote every year — around eighteen times its resident population. The identikit visitor: British (around half the total, the love affair told in card 48), German, Irish — Ireland has a particular romance with this island —, French, Dutch, Nordic and, increasingly, mainland Spanish and Canarians from the other islands. The average stay is about a week, many return year after year — there are British families on their third generation of holidays here — and some take the final step: they stay. The most recent phenomenon stars the digital nomads, who have discovered that "office with a volcano view" is not a metaphor.
The uncomfortable question — can so many people fit into 845 square kilometres? — the island asked itself before anyone else: it was a world pioneer in debating the limits of its own growth, guided by Manrique's legacy and its status as a Biosphere Reserve. That debate is still alive, and it is healthy that it should be.
For the visitor, the lesson is simple and lovely: the person serving your coffee may be the granddaughter of salt workers, a daughter of Naples or newly arrived from Bogotá — and all three are, already, part of the island. Here, "local" was never a race: it was always a way of loving this land.