i congreso de paisaje de canarias may 2026

I Congreso de Paisaje de Canarias: a landmark event for the islands

What do a garden on the edge of apocalypse, La Palma’s lava tubes and Tenerife’s dry-stone terraces have in common?

Landscape. The question, then, is this: what happens when a territory decides to take the matter as seriously as if it were a state policy? From 5 to 7 May, the Canary Islands will host the first Congress on Landscape of the Canary Islands – an unprecedented gathering of its kind in the archipelago. Organised by the CICOP Foundation and promoted by the Presidency of the Government of the Canary Islands, the event brings together nearly 50 experts, including technicians, academics, legal specialists, geographers, architects and institutional representatives from the Canary Islands, the wider Macaronesian islands, the rest of Spain and six other European countries. Over three days, they will debate landscape as a cornerstone of public policy, Macaronesian identity and ecological transition, before an audience of more than 100 attendees.

A tour of the islands with distinct debates

The congress is structured around three thematic blocks, moving from the global to the insular level. On 5 May, at the Gabinete Literario in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, the discussion will focus on the European Landscape Convention and its translation into Spanish and regional regulatory frameworks: how Catalonia, the Balearic Islands, La Rioja and Andalusia have approached their own landscape policies, and what lessons the Canary Islands can learn from them.

On 6 May, at the ULPGC School of Architecture (Tafira Campus), the emphasis shifts to strategic challenges: tourism, infrastructure, transdisciplinary science and the link between architectural design and territorial management.

On 7 May, at the Casa del Vino in El Sauzal (Tenerife), the congress closes with a day dedicated to the Macaronesian landscape as a scientific concept: insularity, vineyard landscapes, laurisilva forests, volcanic tubes and astronomy – all considered in their dimension as a territory unique within Europe. The session will be broadcast live in full via the official YouTube channel of the CICOP Foundation.

Leonardo Caffo, Ana Pires and Eva Villaver

Leonardo Caffo, the Italian philosopher, writer and art curator, will open the session on 7 May with a lecture titled “Making a Garden at the End of the World”. It is a proposal for action in the face of the ecological crisis, turning the act of caring for a landscape into political resistance. Expert Ana Pires, a PhD in geoscience and commander of the CAM mission as a scientist astronaut, will present “Space on Earth: how the volcanic tubes of La Palma and Terceira (Azores) function as living laboratories for studying extraterrestrial habitability conditions” – in other words, the Canarian landscape at the interface between geology and the cosmos. Eva Villaver Sobrino, deputy director of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, will close the lectures with “The Thousand Faces of the Moon: an astrophysics perspective on the night landscape as heritage and as an indicator of the health of the island territory”.

Closing remarks by the president of the Canary Islands

The congress will close on 7 May with the presence of Fernando Clavijo Batlle, president of the Canary Islands, whose words will underline the strategic importance of landscape in the archipelago’s political agenda. This final day, in its entirety, can be followed live via the CICOP Foundation’s YouTube channel from 9:30am.

Why now, and why the Canary Islands?

The Canary Islands combine unique conditions that make them a European laboratory for island landscapes: their belonging to Macaronesia, tourism pressure on the territory, the management of world-renowned natural spaces and the legacy of an agricultural and volcanic landscape without parallel in Europe. This congress also opens the conversation about what regulatory frameworks, planning instruments and scientific knowledge the archipelago needs for landscape to move from being an object of protection to becoming a driver of development.

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