The house where the pottery centre and museum are located is a traditional Canarian house in the village of Arguayo, with a central courtyard and fountain. Here you can learn about the traditional technique for working clay and some of the most characteristic pieces, a legacy of Guanche pottery, which is key to studying its evolution.
The village was founded by Guanche shepherds. The Cha Domitila museum and workshop was designed by Luis Ibáñez, César Manrique’s collaborator in many of his works in Lanzarote, who converted a ruined house into a renovated traditional dwelling. It was inaugurated in 1986. It is the most interesting centre for studying the evolution from Guanche pottery to popular pottery, which, due to the isolation of the place, delayed the acculturation of its inhabitants, maintaining for centuries, the fidelity to the pottery form and typology of the Guanche people. The mastery of technique and proportion in the different types of clay was passed down from generation to generation, giving the pieces great consistency for the purpose for which they were to be used.
The same materials are still used in their production: clay, water, volcanic sand, almagre and some oil. The production process, which is entirely manual, continues to consist of lifting the pieces by hand, scraping and trimming them with barrel bows, smoothing and burnishing them with sea lime, applying ochre impregnated with oil, drying them, decorating them when they are carried and firing them in a kiln in a chamber.
