Timanfaya national park tour: what the park lets you do, and what it does not

Between 1730 and 1736 the ground here opened and kept pouring for six years. When it finally stopped, roughly a quarter of the island was under new rock. Almost nothing has grown on it since, so what the park protects is a landscape frozen at the moment it cooled: cones, collapsed craters, ropes and blocks of black lava, and a palette that runs from rust red to charcoal depending on where the sun is.

The route. A Timanfaya national park tour is built on one circuit, about fourteen kilometres long, which coaches run with commentary. It threads between the cones and along the edges of craters that a car park could never reach. Every Timanfaya national park tour that enters the park uses this same circuit, which is why the listings differ far more in what they add around it than in what they show inside.

The heat. At El Diablo, near the visitor point, the ground still holds warmth from what is underneath it. The demonstration is simple and it is the thing people film: dry brush is lowered into a hollow and catches from the heat alone. It is named in the listing text of $68, which calls them live geothermal experiments.

What you do not do. You do not set off across the crater field on foot. This is not a rule invented by the tour operators; it is how the park is run, and it is the reason a Timanfaya national park walking tour is not something you will find on the listings that go inside. Walking on this lava is entirely possible and genuinely worth doing, but it happens beyond the boundary, on the same 1730 flows, with a guide: $50, $54 and $48 are the three listings that do it.

Nine listings enter the park, and every Timanfaya national park tour among them shows you the same circuit. What they differ in is how much island comes attached.

If you want the park and nothing else, take $68. Five hours, the Volcano Route, the geothermal demonstrations, craters and lava fields, with 2,785 reviews behind it. It is the cleanest version of this booking and the one to take if the rest of your day is already spoken for.

If you want pickup and the vineyards too, take $68. Six hours, hotel pickup available, and it adds the volcanic-pit vineyards that exist nowhere else: vines planted in hollows dug into ash, each sheltered by a low semicircle of stones. It holds 4.4 from 1,019 reviews.

If this is your one day on Lanzarote, take $102. Nine hours, the park plus Jameos del Agua and Cueva de los Verdes, 4.5 from 2,845 reviews. You get the lava from above and the tunnels it left below, which is the whole story of this island in a single day. $100 is the eight-hour version with one cave instead of two.

If your ship is in Arrecife, take $56. Two and a half hours to the park and the green lagoon and back, 4.6 from 2,155 reviews, written around a sailing time. $70 is the longer morning at four and a half hours if your call allows it.

If you are coming from the next island, take $95. Seven hours from Fuerteventura covering the crossing, the park and the south of Lanzarote, at 4.5 from 1,375 reviews.

One circuit, many names. The circuit through the crater field turns up in search boxes under a dozen labels. A Timanfaya national park bus tour and a Timanfaya national park Lanzarote bus tour are the same coach on the same fourteen kilometres. So is the Timanfaya national park Lanzarote volcano route, which is simply the English of what the listings call the Volcano Route. The Timanfaya national park Lanzarote volcano road means it too, and there is no separate road you can take in a hire car.

And the park itself has several. People write Lanzarote volcano park, Lanzarote volcano national park and Lanzarote Timanfaya volcano park, and all three mean this one protected area. Timanfaya national park Lanzarote volcano is the same thing again, with the words in a different order. There is only one national park on this island and the listings here all mean it.

The vineyards. Outside the park, on the ash that fell during those six years, the island grows vines in a way you will not see anywhere else: each plant sits in a hollow dug down into the ash with a low curved stone wall on the windward side. $68 names them in its listing text, and the longer island days pass through as well.

The coast. Where the lava met the sea it left cliffs and half-craters. The green lagoon at El Golfo sits in one of them, close enough to the water to share a beach with it, and it is the usual second stop on the short port trips $56 and $70.

What the reviews keep saying. Across the listings that enter the park the notes repeat: the commentary made the difference, the demonstrations are short but memorable, the coach route is more dramatic than people expected, and a good number of reviewers say plainly that they had not realised they would not be walking.