Archaeology Museum of Lanzarote

The Archeology Museum of Lanzarote brings us through the origins of the people from Lanzarote valuing its rich ethnographic heritage.

The museum is located in a unique building in the Canary Islands due to its architectural features, and it consists of two halls: one for a permanent exhibition about the culture of the majos(aboriginal people from Lanzarote) and another temporary exhibition dedicated to number 5Fajardo Street, as heritage site of the city of Arrecife, the family behind it, and the historical context during which it was built.

The first of the naves, located to the left of the facade from the outside, is the anteroom of the Archaeological Museum of Lanzarote. From this Thursday, it hosts a permanent exhibition with some of the most important archaeological pieces of the culture of the majos present in the inventory of the Cabildo as, for example, the well-known aboriginal piece ‘La Estela de Zonzamas’. In addition, the visitor will be able to enjoy pieces of ceramics, useful made of stone, bone or horn and objects of adornment and ritual.

This space has the latest technology applied to museum spaces such as virtual reality, which will give visitors the opportunity to feel they are members of an archaeological excavation; touch screens, which show different sites of cave paintings, and 360-degree images, which will facilitate the possibility of a virtual tour of different archaeological sites. Another of the spaces in this room is devoted to buried history, in which the incidence of natural phenomena is revealed in the investigation of the island’s past, emphasizing volcanic eruptions and the advance of the jable, which They have covered more than half of the island in recent centuries. This explanation is accompanied by a showcase that exposes elements recovered in the excavations carried out in the Peña de Las Cucharas (Fiquinineo).

Underwater archeology is also present with the explanation of the interventions made in this sense and showing some of the objects found on the seabed of the island, such as amphoras, cannonballs and a pipe. There is also a special section dedicated to explaining the pirate attacks suffered by the island between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries. In addition, the room contains a copy of the book “Le canarien”, written by the Normans upon their arrival on the island, in which the conquest of Lanzarote is narrated.

Room A also includes one of the jewels of the island’s historical heritage: the mummy of an ancient inhabitant of Lanzarote. And it is that the world of the death of the majos is one of the great enigmas of the insular archeology due to the lack of confirmed and cataloged graves. This is probably due to the great geological transformation that the island has undergone in its most recent history due to volcanic eruptions and the invasion of jable in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The Archaeological Museum of Lanzarote can be visited from Tuesday to Friday from 10:30 am to 5:00 pm, and Saturdays, from 10:30 am to 2:00 pm. The entrance fee will be 3 euros for the general visitor, and 1 euro for the insular resident.

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