Last week, commencing 9th September 2024, was the opening day of the 35th Feria de Artesania de Lanzarote at Mancha Blanca.
I am sure that in the nineteen nineties this festival would have been a small, parochial festival of craftsmen showing their work, almost exclusively to friends and neighbours.
We had first learned of the event when we were browsing a copy of a high quality, quarterly, glossy magazine of which our friend Larry Yaskiel, is now Honorary Editor. There was one occasion during our fifteen to twenty holidays we enjoyed here on Lanzarote, before we finally came to live out our retirement in 2015, that we happened to be here when the festival was on. We were never usually able to book our holidays to coincide with the staging of a festival that celebrated carpentry, crocheting, and clothing. Paintings, pottery and plant-care exhibits were also on show.
Since coming here to live we have visited the festival every year and have been astonished by not only the quantity of crafts on show but also the quality of craftsmanship that makes them so unique and desirable. Man, or Woman, might have made every item but there is no manufacturing of the items, if you see what I mean, so rendering each one as being very desirable.
It is a genuinely rustic festival displaying items that reveal a great deal about the history of the island(s) and its struggles to make a living off the land. It tells us much of the health benefits of the plant Aloe Vera. The styles, colours and texture of national costume have stories about the cochineal beetle that was a native of Lanzarote, that produces a rich-coloured dye. Eventually, of course, the world found a way to mass produce an equivalent of the dye more quickly and cheaply than Lanzarote workers so painstakingly laboured to achieve. Gradually demand fell away for Lanzarote’s beautiful shade.
Agricultural tools, hand-honed and heavy are strong and durable, and carvings of dainty and more fragile decorations for indoors and outdoors of the home make the festival a not to be missed event attended now, over a five day period, by thousands of people.
This year the fair is dedicated to Crafts with Vegetable Fibres showcasing its techniques and traditions.
It also showcases the cultural diversity of the Macaronesia, with artisans not only from all the Canarian islands but also from the Azores, Madeira and Cape Verde.
What we had on show on the day we visited this year´s event were the methodology and the outcomes of traditional pottery and traditional carpentry and wood turning. We also had embroidery, ceramics, candle making and both reed basketry and palm basketry being shown.
There were Lutiers with their musical instruments and percussion.
Each artisan had probably set out as self-employed at some time, but many of them have formed their own companies or businesses, as had become evident from reading their details in the fliers and promotional material.
Every artisan showing at the event had to have an artisan’s licence and had to agree to have his work area manned at all times by someone with an artisan’s licence to demonstrate the techniques of their work effectively.
So cutlery designers, ceramicists, tanners and fabric decorators were working side by side in their own individual open-fronted work area with names of companies or individuals proudly displayed alongside their work- tables. We visited jewellers and cigar makers, dressmakers and traditional costumers.
All this has gentrified the artisans. They are no longer lone workers producing goods they find hard to sell. Nowadays artisans know fellow artisans and share their knowledge of the market, new trends and new customer bases.
Their artisan´s licence gives them wider access to training in business techniques, news of market developments and a useful contact list.
I have mentioned before on these pages, I find it remarkable that Lanzarote, its people and its government and its churches and its social services try, and succeed in doing so, to create a powerful unity of politics and religion and the arts and the artisans into almost every public event. I am sure that is what puts the smiles on the faces of those partaking and those in the audience.
That was obvious again today. As so many people wandered the trade stalls, so many other people were sitting in a front of a smallish, temporary stage waiting for the folk- lore group Parranda Los Labradors to begin their outdoor concert in the centre of all the artisanship. To be honest, nobody was getting too impatient because even the sound checks and individual runs and riffs sounded pretty good. The 150 or so seats had all been taken by us and 148 others, and we enjoyed an hour of folk music. Thirteen musicians and four vocalists sent rhyme and rhythm racing into the blue-sky day. Four female singers, one of whom was also playing guitar, created a huge, and beautifully sung Spector-like wall of sound.
There were many obviously humorous songs, with all kinds of hollers and hoops and other strange sounds but I always think that what is common to the best of such groups is the instruments. Today there were guitars, and round back mandolins. There were timples and castanets and big drum percussion.
Suddenly, a new party of people were at the side of the stage. These folk were some of the old and frail of Lanzarote who had been invited by the organisers and were accompanied by their professional carers, and now was the time for another concert by the same group for this new audience.
We all were asked on the microphone by one of the band members if we would all kindly vacate our seats for our special guests.
The audience rose as one and retreated to stand behind the back row of seats immediately occupied by, happy, smiley people, and their equally happy, smile carers.
One of the carers distributed around 150 red roses between the elderly, who were soon on their feet, rose in hand, or mouth, and were swaying happily to the music and singing along to old songs, much-loved.
When the concert was over we took a long tour through the artisan market and then wandered fifty yards down the hill, and sat outdoors at a corner bar. Dee´s white wine was beautifully chilled she said and I told her it couldn´t possibly compare to my cold beer in a frosted pint glass. These drinks were a great complement to two very full bowls of chickpeas. We each then had another drink and our bill still only came to 22 Euros including tip.
Half an hour later we followed across the road to where the carers and their charges were gathered in front of the village´s beautiful church.
Also in front of the church was a statue of Virgin de los Dolores (Virgin of Sorrows) the Patron Saint of the Island of Lanzarote brought outside so that the elderly and their cares could each lay their single rose on the statue.
There was nothing false or forced about any of this. It was just another joyful, and joyous, moment on a day of so many such moments.
We heard no bad language, nobody was barging past people and in fact it was a day with patience in abundance: the kind of patience the artisans have shown over a life-time of honing their crafts.
Mancha Blanca is a town in the municipality of Tinajo. In 2022 it had just over 800 inhabitants. Located southwest of the municipal capital, it is the seat of the hermitage of the Virgin de los Dolores or de los Volcanoes.
Mancha Blanca is right on the edge of the lava fields of Timanfaya National Park . During the volcanic eruptions of 1730 to 1736, and the last major eruption in 1824, lava solidified just a few metres from the site. On both occasions locals sought divine help. On 16 April 1735 they carried in procession an image of the Virgin of Sorrows from the church of San Roque de Tinajo, and marched towards the lava flow, which stopped at Guiguan Mountain. The residents of the village promised to build a shrine for the figure of the Virgin, which was initially completed in 1781 in the form of a small chapel. During the subsequent and last volcanic eruption of 1824, the Virgin of Sorrows again saved Mancha Blanca from the masses of lava – according to the interpretation of the believers. The current sanctuary was finally built in 1862.
In gratitude for the rescue of Mancha Blanca, the image of the Virgin is carried every year on September 15th in a solemn procession around the hermitage-sanctuary of Mancha Blanca and an offering to the Virgin is held.
