Best City Break Stays in Arrecife
Lanzarote is not an island people associate with city breaks, which is exactly why a city break in Arrecife works: the least resort-like capital in the Canaries packs a museum castle, a fishing lagoon, a Blue Flag beach and a pedestrian shopping street into about two square kilometres. Two central hotels carry the tag, Hotel Lancelot opposite Playa del Reducto and Checkin Diamar a few doors along, both within five minutes of the terraces on Calle Leon y Castillo. Travellers who base themselves here get a Canarian working city rather than a promenade of foreign bars, with the airport ten minutes away.
City Break · Arrecife in numbers
Hotels in Arrecife
Among the Canary Islands, Lanzarote is the one where the capital rewards a stay rather than a transit, and Arrecife's compactness is the reason. From a seafront room you reach Playa del Reducto in a minute, the pedestrianised Calle Leon y Castillo in five, and the Charco de San Gines in fifteen along the Avenida Maritima. Hotel Lancelot puts guests opposite the beach with a roof terrace over the rooftops, while Checkin Diamar overlooks the same sand and sits five minutes from the shops. Neither address needs a car for anything inside the city, which is rare on this island.
The cultural argument for a break in Lanzarote's capital rests on Cesar Manrique, the artist who shaped the whole island. His hand is on the Castillo de San Jose above the port, an eighteenth-century fortress he converted into the Museo Internacional de Arte Contemporaneo with a restaurant cut into the rock below. The Castillo de San Gabriel, reached over the Puente de las Bolas drawbridge, holds the city history museum on its islet. Both are walkable from the seafront hotels, which is not true of the Manrique sites out at Tahiche, Guatiza and Haria.
Food is where a city break on this island separates itself from a resort week, and Arrecife's is anchored on the Charco de San Gines. The lagoon is ringed with terraces serving vieja, cherne and papas arrugadas con mojo, and the tables fill with islanders from nine in the evening. Inland, the DO Lanzarote wines of La Geria appear on almost every list, Malvasia Volcanica grown in single-vine hollows dug into black picon. Ordering a glass of it beside the water is the clearest sign that you are not in a resort.
The capital of Lanzarote has an unglamorous, functional charm the island's resorts lack. Ferries load for Gran Canaria at the port, civil servants queue for coffee on Calle Leon y Castillo, and the Charco de San Gines lagoon fills and empties with the tide behind a ring of restaurant terraces. The low white skyline is the result of Manrique's building rules, and the one tower that breaks them is a hotel. Arrecife reads as a real Canarian town going about its day.