Operating a restaurant on a volcano sounds like an insane thing to do, but that's what local notable architect Cesar Manrique has been doing with El Diablo, a restaurant that's been in business – cooking food using volcanic heat – since 1970.
Located in Timanfaya National Park, on Lanzarote, a Spanish island northwest of Morocco, the restaurant's main draw is its volcanic cooking, on a large grill that uses the heat of the volcano to cook meat and fish for its patrons. Thankfully, it's not the type of active volcano with lava flows oozing out; rather, it's dormant, but the smoldering heat from deep within the earth is still enough to cook food.
According to Oddity Central, the restaurant's customized grill was a bit of an architectural feat: in order to bypass the problem of not being able to build conventional foundations due to the heat underground, architects Eduardo Caceres and Jesus Soto used nine layers of volcanic basalt rock to make a suitable cooking pit.
Any of you ever been there?
[story and image via treehugger.com]
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