Explore the real-world places that appear in Bingo Has Been Called by Lana Corujo. Each location on the map shows what happens there in the novel, the real history of the place, and what's there today. Featured locations include Corona Volcánica — El Ahorcado, The Grandmother's House, El Bingo Hall, Timanfaya National Park — Montañas del Fuego, La Verbena — Village Festival Square and 7 more.
Inland volcanic cone, Lanzarote — The sisters' secret threshold
El Ahorcado — round as a belly facing the sky — is the novel's dark heart. In the ten suspended minutes before their grandmother returns from bingo, the two sisters slip out the back door, touch the edge of the volcanic terrain, count to three, and run back without looking behind them. It is their ritual of bravado and terror. One night, something changes in that run, and the boundary between childhood and its end is crossed irreversibly.
Lanzarote's interior is defined by the volcanic eruptions of 1730–1736, among the longest in recorded history, which buried dozens of villages and sculpted the island's eerie, moon-like landscape of cones and lava fields. Local place names — many darkly poetic — reflect the islanders' intimate and fearful relationship with the volcanoes.
The volcanic cones of central Lanzarote are protected within the Timanfaya National Park and surrounding areas. Hiking is permitted on many exterior routes, and the stark, silent landscape draws thousands of visitors annually who are struck by its otherworldly character.
Visit: Timanfaya National Park (park)
Rural interior, Lanzarote — The home with the back door
Everything in the novel pivots around this house and its back door. While Abuela is at bingo, the two sisters exist in a bubble of unsupervised, dangerous freedom. The house holds the silences, the guilt, and the inherited gift that passes through the women of the family. Its walls absorb the violence of a childhood that leaves marks no one outside can see.
Traditional Lanzarote farmhouses — built low against the trade winds, whitewashed, with thick volcanic-stone walls — have defined the island's rural architecture for centuries. Many such homes in the interior municipalities like Tinajo or Yaiza were built near agricultural plots on the malpaís, the rough lava terrain.
Rural casas of this type still dot Lanzarote's interior. Some have been converted into rural tourism accommodations, while others remain family homes passed through generations. Their stark simplicity and isolation give them an atmosphere consistent with the novel's mood.
Village center, Lanzarote — Abuela's nightly escape
The bingo hall is the precise engine of the novel's structure: fifteen numbers on a card, fifteen ages of the protagonist, each chapter hovering over its number like a fly or a butterfly above a title. The ten minutes before Abuela returns from bingo are the window of suspended time in which everything is possible — and in which the sisters' secret ritual is enacted. Bingo, a game of chance and waiting, becomes the novel's central metaphor for fate.
Bingo became enormously popular in Spain during the late Franco era and the transition to democracy, quickly embedding itself in the social fabric of small towns and island communities. In the Canary Islands, neighborhood bingo halls became gathering places, especially for older women, providing community and entertainment.
Bingo halls remain a feature of Spanish town life, including in Lanzarote's municipal centers such as Arrecife and Teguise. Some are integrated into social clubs and bars. The game retains its nostalgic, working-class association in popular culture.
Western Lanzarote — The island's volcanic soul
The rough volcanic terrain of Lanzarote — described in the novel as rofe grueso, the coarse volcanic gravel that defines the island's skin — permeates the book's atmosphere. The landscape is not merely backdrop but character: agreste, bristling, indifferent to human suffering. The sisters' run toward and away from the volcanic cone mirrors the island's own geology of eruption and stillness.
The eruptions of 1730–1736 transformed nearly a quarter of Lanzarote, burying farmland and villages under lava. César Manrique, the island's most celebrated artist, worked alongside the regional government to protect Timanfaya and the broader volcanic landscape, which was designated a national park in 1974.
Timanfaya National Park is one of Spain's most visited natural spaces. Visitors can tour the Montañas del Fuego by bus, observe geothermal demonstrations, and dine at the Restaurante El Diablo, designed by Manrique, where food is cooked using geothermal heat. The park is a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.
Visit: Timanfaya National Park — Montañas del Fuego (park)
Municipal plaza, rural Lanzarote — Summer festivals and collective memory
The verbenas — open-air village festivals with music, lights, and dancing — appear in the novel as moments of collective life that contrast with the family's sealed, private world of wounds. Against the festive noise, the sisters' secret grows heavier. The festival square is a place where the family must appear normal, where silence is dressed up and performed.
Verbenas are a cornerstone of Canarian popular culture, typically held on saints' days and summer evenings in every municipality. In Lanzarote, towns like Haría, San Bartolomé, and Yaiza maintain strong traditions of outdoor festivals with local music, food stalls, and communal dancing that have continued for generations.
Verbenas continue to be held across Lanzarote's municipalities throughout spring and summer. The festivals are free, family-oriented, and deeply rooted in community identity. They are among the most authentic expressions of local culture accessible to visitors.
Visit: Fiestas de San Ginés — Arrecife (historic site)
Northern Lanzarote — Subterranean wonder and dark magic
The novel's language of dark magic and inherited gifts finds its landscape equivalent in Lanzarote's underground world — volcanic tubes that lead into the sea, where strange albino crabs live blind in subterranean lagoons. The novel's sense of something hidden beneath the surface, passed from woman to woman through blood, resonates with this geography of hidden depths and creatures adapted to darkness.
Jameos del Agua is part of the Atlantida Tunnel, the world's longest known volcanic tunnel, stretching nearly 1.5 kilometres under the sea. It is home to the blind albino crab Munidopsis polymorpha, found nowhere else on Earth. César Manrique transformed the site into an art and nature space in 1966, one of his most celebrated interventions.
Jameos del Agua is open to the public as a combined natural, artistic, and cultural space, featuring the subterranean lagoon, an auditorium, gardens, and a museum of volcanology. It is one of Lanzarote's most popular and distinctive attractions.
Visit: Jameos del Agua (landmark)
Northern Lanzarote — Village of memory and female lineage
The lush, enclosed valley of Haría — anomalous in Lanzarote's arid landscape — reflects the novel's preoccupation with pockets of life and feeling hidden inside a harsh world. The grandmother's world of women, gifts, and secrets finds a geographic echo in this village where palm trees crowd close and the valley walls contain everything within.
Haría has been inhabited since the pre-Hispanic Guanche period and was for centuries the most densely populated area of northern Lanzarote thanks to its spring-fed soil. Its palm grove, the densest on the island, earned it the name 'Valley of a Thousand Palms.' César Manrique chose Haría as his final home and studio.
Haría is a well-preserved village with a famous Saturday craft and food market. The César Manrique Foundation maintains his house-museum there, open to the public. The valley retains its extraordinary greenness and intimate, time-stopped atmosphere.
Visit: Haría Village & César Manrique House-Museum (museum)
Eastern coast — Urban center and social mirror
Arrecife functions as the novel's implied social horizon — the larger world beyond the family's isolated interior life. The city represents institutions, schools, commerce, the spaces where the protagonist must move through adolescence at each of her fifteen ages while carrying the weight of what happens at home. Its streets are where private wounds must be concealed.
Arrecife became Lanzarote's capital in 1852, growing from a fishing village into an administrative and commercial hub. Its name means 'reef' in Spanish, referring to the rocky coastline. The city has expanded significantly since the tourism boom of the 1970s and 1980s, becoming the island's only proper urban center.
Arrecife is a working city of roughly 60,000 people with a lively seafront promenade, Playa del Reducto, a marina, and a historic castle, Castillo de San Gabriel, now a small archaeological museum. It retains a non-touristy, local character distinct from the resort towns.
Visit: Arrecife City Centre & Castillo de San Gabriel (historic site)
Agricultural interior, Lanzarote — The island's rough skin
The novel's prose is described as agreste como el rofe grueso de Lanzarote — as rough and wild as Lanzarote's coarse volcanic gravel. Rofe is the porous black volcanic stone used in a uniquely Canarian farming technique: spread across fields, it traps moisture from the sea fog and allows crops to grow in near-desert conditions. The island's people are formed by the same harshness — survival extracted from impossible ground.
The enarenado technique — covering fields with a layer of lapilli, the coarse volcanic gravel called rofe or picón — was developed by Lanzarote farmers after the 1730 eruptions destroyed the island's soil. It is one of the most distinctive agricultural systems in the world, producing the island's famous wine, onions, and potatoes. Vineyards near La Geria are the most iconic example.
The La Geria wine region, where vines grow in individual volcanic craters surrounded by low stone walls, is a protected agricultural landscape and a major tourist attraction. Bodegas including El Grifo — one of Spain's oldest wineries — offer tastings and tours.
Visit: La Geria Wine Region & Bodega El Grifo (landmark)
Rural home exterior, Lanzarote — The boundary between safety and the volcano
The back door of the grandmother's house is one of the novel's most charged images: the precise boundary between the interior world of family, silence, and violence, and the exterior world of the volcanic night. The sisters slip through it in those ten suspended minutes, cross toward El Ahorcado, count to three, and run back. The night something changes, the back door becomes the threshold through which childhood exits and does not return.
Traditional Canarian rural houses typically had a main door facing the street and a back door opening onto a patio or agricultural land. This spatial arrangement reflected the public/private divide fundamental to island family life, with the back of the house being the domain of domestic and agricultural labor, hidden from the village gaze.
This location exists as a literary geography rather than a specific identifiable address, though its character is entirely consistent with hundreds of surviving rural homes in Lanzarote's interior municipalities. The back-door threshold as liminal space is a recurring element of Canarian narrative literature.
Northern tip, Lanzarote — Looking beyond the island's edge
The novel's protagonist lives within an island landscape that is both total world and total enclosure. Mirador del Río — the viewpoint at Lanzarote's northern extreme — offers a view of La Graciosa and the open Atlantic, the world beyond the family's sealed universe. The fifteen ages the protagonist traverses are marked by the slow understanding that there is a horizon beyond the violence she has known.
The cliff at Risco de Famara was used as a military battery position during the early 20th century. César Manrique transformed the derelict fortification into the Mirador del Río in 1973, one of his signature architectural works that integrates seamlessly into the clifftop basalt, almost invisible from a distance.
Mirador del Río is a publicly accessible viewpoint and one of Lanzarote's most celebrated architectural landmarks. Managed by the César Manrique Foundation, it offers panoramic views across the Río strait to La Graciosa island. A café inside the structure serves visitors.
Visit: Mirador del Río (landmark)
Central Lanzarote — History, tradition, and Sunday ritual
Teguise represents the layer of island tradition beneath the novel's present tense — the old capital where Canarian history sediments, where rituals repeat through generations. In a novel structured around the repetition of a number called at bingo, the idea of a place that carries everything that came before resonates with Teguise's role as repository of collective memory.
Teguise was Lanzarote's capital from the 14th century until 1852. It was repeatedly sacked by Berber pirates during the 16th and 17th centuries, and its Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe and the hilltop Castillo de Santa Bárbara testify to centuries of island resilience. The town's historic center is one of the best preserved in the Canary Islands.
Teguise hosts one of the Canary Islands' most famous Sunday markets, drawing thousands of visitors to its historic streets. The Castillo de Santa Bárbara houses the Museum of Piracy. The town's whitewashed architecture and cobblestone squares have made it a cultural anchor of Lanzarote.
Visit: Teguise Sunday Market & Castillo de Santa Bárbara (historic site)
More by Lana Corujo: All Lana Corujo books