SUNRISE TO SUNSETJuan & Laura
Juan and Laura are from Lanzarote, and they wanted to spend their wedding day showing the island off the way people who live somewhere show it to you: the good coast at first light, the back roads in between, the places the tour buses skip. They did the whole day in their own Land Rover, sunrise to sunset, and it went most of the way around the island.
Lanzarote is a strange and beautiful place to get married. Black lava and white houses, vineyards grown in volcanic gravel, red cliffs where the Atlantic comes in hard. As a Lanzarote wedding photographer you could not ask for a better canvas, and with Juan driving, the day reached corners of the island I would not have found on my own.
Laura wore a dress by le mariage. If you are planning a Lanzarote wedding or an elopement, this is the day I love to shoot, and I would be glad to help you map one out.
Sunrise on the Lanzarote coast
The day started before the sun, down on the coast with almost no one else around. The sunrise that came was the best I have ever stood through, anywhere. The sky went pink, then red, then a colour I do not have a word for, and it held like that far longer than these things ever last. It was closer to a dream than to a morning. Juan and Laura stood in it and did not say much. There was not a lot to say.
A cove of red rock and turquoise water
From the beach to a cove where the water turns bright turquoise against red volcanic rock. That colour, the blue against the red, is Lanzarote at its best, and this couple knew exactly where to find it.
The vineyards of La Geria
La Geria is where Lanzarote grows its wine, each vine planted in a scooped hollow of black gravel behind a low curved wall that keeps the wind off. There is nowhere else that looks like it. Juan and Laura walked it in black and white, the whole valley of little stone half-moons running out behind them.
Across the lava fields by Land Rover
The middle of the island is volcanic country, black and rust-red and mostly empty. This is the ground the Land Rover was built for, rough roads out to the old cones. Juan and Laura stood in the lava with the volcanoes behind them, two small figures in a very big landscape.
A field gone purple
Then something completely different: a field gone purple with wildflowers, low and soft after all that hard rock. It is an easy island to underestimate. You come for the volcanoes and end up sitting in a meadow.
The west coast and the green lagoon at El Golfo
The west coast is where Lanzarote turns dramatic. Red cliffs drop straight into the sea and the waves come through the lava with real force. At El Golfo a green lagoon sits right behind a black beach, the water an unreal shade against the dark sand. Juan and Laura took the cliffs and the lagoon in their stride, the way you do when it is your own island.
Sunset over the Atlantic
The day ended where it should, out on the cliffs with the sun going down over the Atlantic. A full loop of the island in one day, sunrise to sunset, most of it from the seat of a Land Rover. If an island wedding like this is what you want on Lanzarote, you know where to find me.
