Lanzarote Volcano Tours: Timanfaya, the Lava Caves and La Geria

Start here, because this is where the internet is wrong. A page that still ranks near the top for Timanfaya tickets gives the adult price as twelve euros. The published adult price is thirty euros, and it has not been twelve for a long time. If you have budgeted from a blog rather than from the operator, you are eighteen euros a head short before anything else happens.

Three rules attach to that ticket and all three catch people out. Entry is by timed slot bought online, and there is no ticket office solution: turning up at the gate without a booking does not work in high season and is a gamble in low. You are asked to arrive fifteen minutes before your slot, and the entrance queue on the LZ-67 can take an hour or more between about eleven and three in summer, which is the same window everyone else chooses. And the terms are unusually hard: no changes, no refunds, no transfer to another day. A wet morning is not a reason to get your money back.

The camels are the other recurring confusion. They are not run by the park, they are not on your ticket, and they load at a separate yard on the road in. The figure in circulation is about twelve euros for a camel carrying two people, but the only official page carrying it is several years old, so treat it as an order of magnitude rather than a quote and bring cash.

You drive from the entrance up to the car park at the Islote de Hilario, and between those two points you are required to stay in the vehicle. At the top there is a car park, a restaurant, a viewing terrace and a queue for the coach. The coach does the Ruta de los Volcanes, fourteen kilometres of one-way track through the middle of the eruption in thirty-five to forty minutes, with commentary and without stopping. You do not get off, and there are no photo halts. This is the single most useful sentence on the page: pick your side of the bus when you board, because you cannot change your mind, and shoot through glass accordingly.

The demonstrations at the Islote de Hilario take about ten minutes and are the reason the place is called the fire mountains. Brushwood dropped into a shallow pit catches by itself. Water poured down a pipe comes back as a jet of steam. Under the grill of the restaurant the ground is around 250 degrees at five metres down, and the kitchen cooks on that heat rather than on gas, which is a genuinely strange thing to eat lunch on top of. The restaurant does not take bookings and seats in the order people arrive.

The whole visit inside the park runs to well under two hours. That is not a criticism, it is the shape of the product, and it explains why almost every listing on this island bolts Timanfaya to something else.

Most volcanic destinations have a landscape and a separate tourist industry stuck to the side of it. Lanzarote has neither, because from the 1960s onwards one man was allowed to design both. César Manrique fought successful campaigns against high-rise building and roadside advertising, and then built a network of visitor centres that are also artworks: the restaurant above the geothermal pit, the concert chamber inside a lava tube, the cliff-top viewpoint hidden behind a hillside, a garden laid out in an old quarry.

The practical consequence is that these places share an operator, a booking system and a house style, and that they are cheap. Two of them, the northern viewpoint and the cactus garden, cost nine euros. The caves cost seventeen each. The farmer's monument is free. Against thirty for Timanfaya, that is an unusual price ladder, and it means a serious Lanzarote day can be assembled for less than a single excursion elsewhere in the Canaries.

The thing worth noticing at Timanfaya is not the volcano. It is that a national park, a restaurant, a coach fleet and a species of tourism were all designed at once, by people who had decided in advance what the island was not going to become.

The twenty-one listings sort cleanly into three groups, and the differences are real. The table is the fastest way to see which one answers your question; each has a page of its own below with the operational detail.

If you have one day, the honest answer is that the caves and Timanfaya are the two things you will remember and they are at opposite ends of a small island. The full-day coach products that combine them exist for exactly that reason and are worth their ninety euros. If you have two days, split them, and put the guided walk on the second: it is the only way to be alone on this lava, it costs forty-two euros, and it is the highest rated thing in the Lanzarote catalogue.

The two listings that sit directly under this page rather than in one of the three groups are both vehicles. A bike tour of the Los Volcanes Natural Park at 119 EUR, and a four-seat buggy at 180 EUR that covers about seventy kilometres, stops for a forty minute walk around the crater of El Cuervo and finishes at Las Grietas, the fissures below Montaña Blanca. The buggy requires a full category B licence held for at least two years and a driver of twenty or over, which is not obvious from the listing photographs.

Lanzarote is small, about sixty kilometres end to end, and the roads are good and almost empty. From the southern resorts to Timanfaya is half an hour, to La Geria twenty minutes, to the caves in the north closer to an hour. A hire car changes the economics of everything on this page, because the caves and the wineries can then be done for the price of the entrances instead of the price of a coach seat. Timanfaya is the exception: the ticket costs the same either way, and a coach at least means somebody else sits in the queue on the LZ-67.

There is no season to plan around, and that is one of the better arguments for this island over the rest of the archipelago. Nothing closes for winter. The sites open every day of the year, the temperature moves by a few degrees between January and August, and the trade wind that makes the summers bearable also blows in February. Two things do change the day. The park occasionally shuts for high wind, and at least one operator states in its own conditions that the trip then goes to the interpretation centre instead. And cruise calls at Arrecife put several thousand extra people onto the same three sites at the same hours, which is another reason to book the first slot of the morning rather than the middle of the day.