THE PLACE:
"The airport is located in San Bartolomé, Las Palmas, 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) southwest of the island's capital, Arrecife. It handles flights to many European airports, with hundreds of thousands of tourists each year, as well as internal flights to other Spanish airports. It handled 7,327,019 passengers in 2018.
In the 1930s a need for an aerodrome on the island became evident when connections were required with the other islands and the mainland, as well as a refuelling point for aircraft. Subsequently, an airfield was built at Llanos de Guacimeta. The first aircraft to land at the airport was a Junkers Ju 52 EC-DAM on the 24 July 1941. The Spanish Air Force then saw a need for a permanent aerodrome for defence purposes, and this was constructed in Arrecife. In 1946 the airport provisionally accepted civil traffic. Improvements were carried out to the existing facilities, with a runway extension and additional ramp space provided.
A new passenger terminal was constructed along with a control centre, and on 3 March 1970 international and domestic flights began using the airport. A centrepiece of the Gaucimeta terminal was the mural created by Caesar Manrique entitled Lanzarote.
Development since the 1990s
The growing use of the airport called for the need of improved facilities. DME, ILS and VOR facilities were installed for Runway 03/21 along with additional holding points. New runway lighting and a fire station were also commissioned. In 1999 a new passenger terminal opened (Terminal 1), with a capacity of 6 million passengers per annum. Since then, the original passenger terminal has been revamped and is now used for inter-island flights (Terminal 2).
In 2002, in response to interest from both tourists and local people about the island's aviation heritage, Aena decided to use the Guacimeta passenger terminal as an aviation museum. The museum provides a comprehensive and detailed insight into the history of aviation on the island. There are a number of audio-visual presentations.
As a tribute to the legacy left behind by local artist César Manrique, the airport's official name was changed in 2019, coinciding with the centenary of the artist's birth"
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THE PERSON:
"César Manrique (1919-1992) was born in Arrecife, Lanzarote, an island where his artistic career has left indelible marks.
After finishing his studies at the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid (where he lived between 1945 and 1964), he frequently exhibited his paintings both inside and outside of Spain. In the first half of the fifties, he delved into non-figurative art and investigated the qualities of matter until he became the essential protagonist of his compositions, thus linking himself to the Spanish informalist movement of those years.
Formalized with a material and abstract expression, the plastic imaginary of his pictorial production comes from the impressions of the volcanic landscape of Lanzarote, which the artist transmutes into a kind of non-realistic naturalism that is not born from the copy of the natural but from his emotional understanding: "I try to be the free hand that shapes geology," he wrote.
In 1964, he moved to New York, where he had three solo exhibitions at the Catherine Viviano Gallery. His direct knowledge of American Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, New Sculpture, and Kinetic Art provided him with a fundamental visual culture for his later creative career.
In the mid-sixties, coinciding with his transfer of residence to Lanzarote, César Manrique promoted on the Island a series of artistic projects of a spatial and landscape nature, novel for the time, where he reflected his plastic and ethical thinking . It is a set of actions and interventions aimed at enhancing the island's landscape and natural attractions, which will shape its new face and international projection, and which is part of the landscape transformation and adaptation of Lanzarote to the economy of tourism.
Thus, he developed a new aesthetic ideology, which he called art-nature / nature-art, in which he integrates different artistic manifestations, which he was able to specify in his landscape works, a unique example of public art in Spain: Jameos del Agua, Mirador del Río , Cactus Garden, Timanfaya, etc. They are fundamentally interventions linked to the tourist industry, to which Manrique prints an economic and social functionalism unprecedented in Spanish artistic culture. Works of this nature were also carried out by Manrique on other islands and outside the Canarian archipelago, —looking points, gardens, conditioning of degraded spaces, reforms of the coastline… -, in which he maintains his basic characteristic features: respectful dialogue with the natural environment and between the architectural values ??of the local tradition with modern conceptions."