Colour theory holds that light is indispensable to its perception, but in Lanzarote another factor comes into play: water. There is a strip of the island that has shed its skin in recent days. Between the hieratic camels of Uga and the calm of Puerto Calero, on the hillsides that look out over Playa Quemada, the ground — usually austere, stony, almost monochrome — has filled with an unexpected violet. It is not a garden, nor a plantation, nor a human gesture. It has happened without asking permission.
The rains make Lanzarote speak, but it does not do so stridently. The watery green that flecks the whole island is adorned here by irregular mauve patches at ground level, spreading as though following an intimate, secret logic known only to the land itself. You drive, you look up: there they are.
The island's earth promises nothing, but at the slightest hint of moisture it gives thanks with all its might. For months it appears dry, mineral, restrained. But when it responds, it does so with precise intensity. These bloomings do not contradict the volcanic landscape; they simply complete it. They spring from the same black, stony ground, as if, for a moment, it remembered that it too can create life.
The plant that is tinting these hillsides belongs to the genus Echium, popularly known as the creeping tajinaste (a low-growing bugloss). It is a humble species, hugging the ground, very different from the tall, monumental tajinaste that tends to steal the limelight on other islands. Its bluish, violet-tinged flowers appear after the rains and do not last long. They do not seek to impose themselves. They appear, complete their cycle and disappear.
This flowering is, above all, a lesson in time. In waiting. In paying attention. In a few weeks there will be no trace of it. The violet will fade, the green will retreat and Lanzarote will return to its apparent silence. As if nothing had happened.
But it did happen. And perhaps that is one of the most honest forms of beauty the island has to offer: the kind that does not announce itself, that does not last, that does not appear in digital tourist guides.
The kind that happens while someone watches and someone else walks straight past.