Palacio Ico is a manor house of around 1690 in Teguise, the old capital, and it still has the bones of a Canarian noble house: wide whitewashed stone walls, a courtyard with wooden balconies, and coffered ceilings of tea pine four to five metres high. César Manrique put the house in Lanzarote, arquitectura inédita, his survey of the island's traditional building. In the 1980s the Swiss artist Heidi Bucher bought the house, named it Palacio Ico and cast its doors and balconies in latex for her skinnings. The present owners opened it as a hotel in 2017, the year it was classed an Emblematic Hotel, a category kept for historic buildings.
There are nine rooms and suites, each kept to the size of the original space and each different. Room 01 opens onto the courtyard under its original tea-pine ceiling. Suite 04 has its own patio with an outdoor shower. Suite 05, about 65 m², was Bucher's gallery and has white marble floors and a green marble bathroom. Suite 06 sits in the tower with two balconies, one on the outside of the house and one within it. The decoration is spare on purpose: micro-cement bathrooms in the suites, local ceramics, paintings by Ildefonso Aguilar, a library of more than 300 art books and a record player with a shelf of vinyl. Breakfast is cooked to order and served at the table.
This is the classic way to see Lanzarote's history rather than its beaches. The church of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe and the Plaza de la Constitución are a three-minute walk, the convents of San Francisco and Santo Domingo six. On Sunday morning the Mercadillo fills those streets with more than 400 stalls; after 14:00 the stalls pack up and the town is quiet again. In the evening the dining room serves two tasting menus from chef Víctor Valverde built on La Santa prawns, Uga smoked salmon and Canarian black pig, recommended by MICHELIN and holding a Repsol Sol. Teguise is central: the Fundación César Manrique is 10 minutes away by car, Famara beach 14 and the Jameos del Agua 25.
The trade is plain. There is no pool and no beach, and the cheapest room, Room 02, has no window beyond a small pane in its door. The restaurant does not open every night, and the hotel asks for two or three nights at a time. Book it for a few days of the island's interior, with a car, good dinners and a quiet courtyard, and pair it with a few nights on the coast if you want swimming. For couples who care how a place looks, tastes and sounds at night, it is hard to beat.
