Some People Collect Michelin Stars. We Collect Tele Clubs.
Some people travel the world collecting Michelin stars.
They know where to find the newest tasting menu in Copenhagen, the restaurant with a waiting list months long in Paris, or the restaurant everyone is talking about in San Sebastián.
We understand that.
We love good food too.
We have sat in beautiful restaurants where a small army of waiters carefully presented every course, explained every ingredient and made sure everything was perfect.
And often it was.
Yet years later, we rarely remember what was on the plate.
What stays with us are the unexpected moments.
A conversation.
An invitation.
A village we had never visited before.
Or a waiter in a Tele Club looking at a local friend and saying:
"Don't order that."
But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
Five years ago, after already spending nearly a decade coming back to Lanzarote whenever we could, we finally discovered Guatiza. During those years we usually visited the island once or twice a year.
We explored the island. We drove thousands of kilometers. We visited beaches, volcanoes, viewpoints and villages.
And yet somehow, we never stopped in Guatiza.
Not once.
Part of the reason was simple. Guatiza was never really on the way to anywhere we were going. The main road north bypassed the village completely, and every time we drove towards places like Arrieta, Órzola or Mirador del Río, we would pass the sign pointing to Guatiza and keep going.
We saw the name countless times over the years, but somehow we never turned off the road to see what was there.
Then one evening our local friends invited us to dinner.
"Meet us at the Tele Club in Guatiza."
That was all.
No recommendation.
No explanation.
No five-star review.
Just an invitation.
We arrived at the village square just before sunset and our jaws dropped at how beautiful it was.
The church.
The palm trees.
The quiet atmosphere.
And the strange feeling that we had somehow missed one of the most beautiful places on the island for almost a decade.
How was that even possible?
A village had been sitting there all along, only a few minutes from places we knew well.
We had already visited Jardín de Cactus once — the village's most famous landmark and one of Lanzarote's must-see attractions — and felt no need to return. We never really had a reason to turn off the road and stop in Guatiza, so we simply passed by.
That evening we had dinner at the Tele Club.
At one point the waiter looked at Aitor, the son of our friend Loli, and said:
"Don't order that."
No explanation.
No sales pitch.
Just honest advice.
And somehow that tiny moment told us more about Lanzarote than many travel articles ever could.
Because the best places on the island are rarely discovered through search engines.
They are discovered through people.
Someone takes you there.
Someone introduces you.
Someone tells you what to order.
Or what not to order.
Over time we realised that many of our favourite places on Lanzarote share one thing in common.
We didn't find them.
Some places reveal themselves only when the time is right. We like to think we discover them, but perhaps they are the ones that quietly wait for us to notice.
Looking back, it feels as if Guatiza had been waiting for us all along.
Patiently sitting beside a road we travelled hundreds of times.
One evening we finally turned off.
Three years later, it became home.
