The Lanzarote Cactus Garden wins the Carlo Scarpa Award 2017

The Cactus Garden has earned a new international award!

The Benetton Foundation, based in the Italian city of Treviso, carefully selects the most spectacular gardens on the planet each year, honouring the one that best represents the values of nature conservation and its integration with local history and culture.

The star of this XXVIII edition of the Carlo Scarpa International Award, chosen unanimously, is our Cactus Garden, one of the last works designed by Lanzarote artist César Manrique in 1990.

The jury is made up of a committee that examines each garden from various scientific disciplines. On this occasion, the experts responsible for awarding the prize were an architect, two landscape architects, an agronomist, a garden historian, two art historians, a geographer, a botanist, and a philosopher.

The committee analysed the garden for a year, concluding that it symbolises “the perfect balance between fertile nature and culture” and allows visitors to “recognise beauty with new eyes.”

Why does the Cactus Garden receive the Carlo Scarpa Award?

The scientific committee fell in love with the Jardín de Cactus for several reasons:

• It is a living example of how to preserve the land. César Manrique transformed a completely abandoned plot of land into a botanical gem that attracts thousands of curious visitors from all over the world each year.
• It was built using local cultivation techniques: the garden is a concentric system of terraces and environments, decorated with volcanic stone walls and picón, to protect a diverse and beautiful collection of cacti, crowned by a traditional Canarian windmill.
• It achieves perfect harmony between art, history, and nature. Positioned at the highest points of the garden, visitors can observe how the 4,500 cacti blend seamlessly into the surrounding landscape: the largest prickly pear plantation in Lanzarote. The shapes and colours of the landscape camouflage one another, creating original connections between wild nature and human hands.
• It is located in a unique and privileged setting. The jury highlighted the original cultivation system and how it has adapted to the volcanic landscape and its craters.

The award aims to promote the culture of good landscape management, serve as an example, and raise global awareness about the care of our natural environments. For this reason, the award ceremony will be accompanied by study campaigns about the awarded location, scientific exchange sessions, and multidisciplinary debates, all compiled in a monographic dossier.

The Carlo Scarpa Award places Lanzarote in general, and the Cactus Garden in particular, as the subject of study for gardening and the scientific community. Furthermore, this award serves as a global showcase to introduce our island and its unique garden to the world. To date, the news has been covered by over 80 international media outlets, including prestigious publications like the well-known Corriere della Sera.

If you haven’t visited the Cactus Garden yet, what are you waiting for? Head to the village of Guatiza to explore these stunning plants and the volcanic landscape they’re surrounded by.

Just remember to keep taking care of our precious garden and be careful with the spines, as they can prick!