He was responsible for the building regulations restricting the resorts to two storeys and dictating that all buildings should stick to traditional, white-painted exteriors (he even decreed that all the shutters had to be green). He called the concept “nature art”.Manrique didn’t just work as a landscape architect, though. Most of the big attractions on Lanzarote are the buildings, gardens and spaces he designed between 1966, when he returned to Lanzarote after living in New York, and his death in a car crash in 1992. What sets Manrique’s legacy of projects apart is that they all incorporate the natural features of the landscape into their intergalactic-style structures.First stop on the Manrique trail should be the Castillo de San Jose, just outside the capital, Arrecife – and not just because this old, castellated tower on the waterfront is the best of his work, with its Wallpaper-style, funky restaurant and huge, wraparound windows.

But because the contemporary art museum it holds above the restaurant shows very clearly why Manrique was right to give up art for landscape architecture. His paintings were dire.The main Manrique attraction is his former house, now an extraordinary museum and gallery, where the surrounding lava fields seem to spill in through the windows and cascade across the floor. He also used his talents to forge a theatre and nightclub hidden away in a partly exposed cave, a weird cactus garden set in the remains of an old quarry, and a bug-eye-shaped lookout point spilling over the edge of a mountain in the north of the island. In the sleepy, rural village of Nazaret, he also designed the ultimate bachelor pad for Omar Sharif.Supposedly lost by the actor in a spectacularly unsuccessful game of bridge, Lagomar is now a restaurant, though not a particularly good one People come here for the setting rather than the food. It’s perched, nest-like, on the ledge of a cliff face, the bar and restaurant set around an organic, white puddle of a pool, with tunnels, cosy seating areas and even some bedrooms positioned, James Bond-like, over stepping stones inside the rock. With its lush palm trees and luxury troglodyte style, the effect is part desert oasis, part Grand Designs.Today, Manrique’s philosophy lives on in the shape of several new luxury hotels that have opened on Lanzarote over the past few years. Rather than turning to brash, new-build development, the owners have, instead, converted some of the landscape’s most characterful old haciendas, farms and town houses.

First came Finca Las Salinas, in Yaiza, a colourful Arabic-style farmhouse with the kind of brightly coloured garden that would have given Frida Kahlo a run for her pesos. Casa Tegoyo, outside Conil, also boasts a Mexican vibe with its balconied courtyard, atmospheric, old wooden structure and cactus plants. Then there’s Villa Lola y Juan, in the centre of Haria, a lively village tucked in a deep valley in the north of the island and surrounded by pale gold grass and palm-scattered hillside.I booked in at the Caserio de Mozaga. A whitewashed former dairy, right in the centre of the island, in the village of Mozaga, it is run by a Canarian woman and her brother who returned from Madrid a few years ago to turn their grandmother’s home into a hotel. One of the island’s most successful renovations, its contemporary-country aesthetic is enhanced by quirky, arid gardens and elaborate courtyards. Though the interior d?r is soothingly neutral, a nicely chosen collection of family heirlooms and laid-back staff give it plenty of character.

Caserio de Mozaga also has one of the best restaurants on the island.If only all the tourists appreciated it. While “Lanzagrotty” might have moved on, some of its British visitors obviously haven’t. When the waiter ran through the night’s menu – a different selection announced at the last minute every evening, to make the most of locally available ingredients – a couple at the next table balked at some of the more adventurous suggestions. “Watermelon soup? What the heck is that?” they spluttered.Maybe a decade hasn’t changed some things on the island much after all.