Active Volcanoes of the Canary Islands

Active Volcano In Canary Islands — Active Volcanoes of the Canary Islands

In search of active volcanoes, a journey to three islands: La Palma, Tenerife, and Lanzarote.

Words & Photos Park Shinwoo
Park Shinwoo is South Korea’s representative in Fujifilm’s global sponsorship program, the ‘GFX Challenge Grant Program 2021.’ At the end of last April, for his project ‘A Journey to Active Volcanoes in Search of Sublime Beauty,’ he traveled to Spain’s Canary Islands, where he spent about four weeks visiting volcanic islands and recording their active volcanic landscapes. The project was first unveiled on Fujifilm’s global website on September 30, and a photo exhibition followed in November at Fujifilm Square in Tokyo Midtown.

La Palma

In 2021, the Cumbre Vieja volcano in the center of La Palma erupted, and its lava flowed all the way to the sea on the island’s western coast. No one died, but lava covered an area stretching dozens of kilometers and destroyed most of the island’s west. The island covers 708 square kilometers and is home to about 85,000 people.

I became curious about the lives of people who live near active volcanoes, but the internet offered few easy answers. Why don’t they move away? Aren’t they afraid of the volcano? What do they do about laundry when ash falls? How do they evacuate when an eruption begins, and what do they grab first? What do they gain from living in a volcanic area? Does a date on an active volcano make love for your partner grow stronger? Once I had jotted down everything I wondered about, I realized these were questions only someone who had experienced it could answer. Since a web search couldn’t tell me, the only way was to go and see for myself.

Access is restricted in many places around active volcanoes at alert level 3 or higher. Every site I visited this time fell under level 3, so I couldn’t reach the summit craters. Still, I got as close as I could, breathing in sulfurous gas as I observed eruptions that were still under way. The destructive landscapes created when a volcano erupts have a strange allure found only here. Along the way, I came to understand something new. An active volcano is surely no place for people to live. Yet even in such a barren environment, people have survived, built lives in many forms, and kept their cultures alive and growing.

Tenerife

Tenerife is the largest and most populous of the Canary Islands, and the seat of the archipelago’s capital. Teide, at the center of the island, is the highest active volcano in Europe. Eruptions hundreds of thousands of years ago lowered a peak that once stood well above 4,000 meters to 3,715 meters and formed an enormous caldera dozens of kilometers across. The volcano and its surroundings are now protected as Teide National Park.

Lanzarote

Of all the Canary Islands, Lanzarote feels the most exotic to Koreans. Parasitic cones like Jeju Island’s oreum are scattered evenly across the island. Timanfaya National Park, formed by eruptions in the 1800s, is one of the island’s main attractions. La Geria, the world’s only active-volcano winery region, lies within it as well.

Order in our inner world and the growth of the soul are essential for taming the twisted impulses of the city. City dwellers finding rest in nature seems perfectly natural now, but in the span of human history it is a fairly recent habit. People who lived in cities began turning toward nature only once cities appeared, around the eighteenth century. Compare the scale and functions of cities then and now, and the cities of that era hardly seem like cities at all. Yet then as now, those who live in cities long for nature. Why? Here is what I think: to restore the body’s health and to recover order in a tangled inner world. The role religion once played for the soul has, today, been taken over by nature. You have probably experienced it yourself: after facing great nature, tangled and twisted impulses settle into place on their own, or the order of your inner world is restored in a kind of harmony found there.

Then what about an active volcano? Face to face with one, I felt it resembled a deep, unresolved anxiety that is bound to burst someday. And a volcanic eruption felt like something tightly clogged finally breaking through. Perhaps that is why so many people come to see a raging volcano: for the sake of order in their inner world.