The sight of Penelope Cruz, in Broken Embraces, locked in a loving clinch on windswept El Golfo beach is enough to make many people rethink their idea of Lanzarote, a Spanish island more often associated with time-share touts and package tourism. While the small pockets of development around its main resorts, Puerto del Carmen, Playa Blanca and Costa Teguise, attract the bulk of British holidaymakers and many of the 6,000 expats from the UK who live on the island, you need drive for only a few minutes to reach a world of whitewashed houses and volcanic expanses that prompted Pedro Almodovar, the film’s director, to enthuse about the island’s “sombre, monochrome beauty”.

Then again, Lanzarote has always trodden a different path than mainland Spain. When tourism arrived in the 1960s, Cesar Manrique, an architect and one of the island’s most famous sons, drew up a blueprint for its development that ensured there were no high-rises, and that new buildings were painted white. Manrique became Lanzarote’s town planner, even designing a house on a volcano for Omar Sharif — which the actor promptly lost in a game of bridge in 1972.

Many Britons who have made Lanzarote their home have continued in his footsteps, keeping the stark, largely treeless island green — in the ecological sense, at least. “We’re an island off southern Morocco, in the Atlantic, with wind and sun every day of the year. Where better to use wind, wave and solar energy to power your home?” says Michelle Braddock, who moved to the island from Surrey 15 years ago. With her English husband, Tila, a windsurfing instructor, she owns what she claims are Lanzarote’s first totally green properties.

The couple’s 30,000 sq metre “eco-village” in Arrieta, on the north coast, includes a restored farmhouse where they live with their four children, aged between 7 and 14. They let out the neighbouring properties, including a two-bedroom Moroccan-style villa, a one-bedroom fisherman’s cottage on the seafront, a one-bedroom stone cottage with a solar-heated pool overlooking the beach, and four yurts set among mango, banana and peach trees. The entire estate is powered by two wind turbines, two solar water heaters and 34 solar panels (Finca de Arrieta; 00 34-696 982873, lanzaroteretreats.com).

“We began buying land and building villas around Punta Mujeres, in the north of the island, in the mid-1990s, when the government was selling urban land cheaply to encourage more construction,” says Michelle, 37, whose three-bedroom villas there are now valued at about £280,000. The couple’s focus changed five years ago, however, when they took on the renovation of an old house without electricity in El Mojon, in the centre of the island.

“It would have cost £15,000 to connect to the grid, so instead we installed a windmill and solar panels, which didn’t work out much cheaper, but meant we could be self-sufficient,” she says. “We loved the way it worked, and after that we didn’t want to go back on the grid again. When we moved into Finca de Arrieta, we learnt to change the way we lived, conserving energy by using cold water in the washing machine and not having plasma TVs or a dishwasher, which is the only thing I miss.”

Expats in search of a simpler, more rustic way of life, particularly in the north, in villages such as Famara, where Cruz stays in a beach cottage in Broken Embraces, have bought homes that, because of their remoteness, run on alternative power sources. Among them is Nick Ball, editor of Lanzarote Guidebook, a property and travel website. “It’s a beautiful and surprisingly cosmopolitan island,” he says, “but you still can’t reach a lot of the island on tarmac roads, and the infrastructure remains undeveloped compared with the Balearics or the other Canaries, so you often have to install solar power in homes off the grid.”

Ball lives with his wife, Gabriela, in a solar-powered farmhouse in the small village of Haria, which he bought for £218,000 two years ago. “Wind power is noisy, like having a helicopter on your roof, and it doesn’t generate much power, but we installed solar panels for about £7,000, part subsidised by a government grant,” he says.

Lanzarote — once rather cruelly labelled Lanzagrotty by Michael Palin — hasn’t escaped the downturn completely, of course. Like all of Spain’s holiday destinations, it relies heavily on British buyers and has seen new developments in the main resorts put on ice. “Prices in places like Puerto del Carmen are lower than when I moved here eight years ago,” Ball says. Studio flats there go for less than £50,000, while two-bedroom villas with pools start at just under £200,000.

According to Spain’s official — if somewhat optimistic — house-price index, prices fell by just 4% in the first three months of this year, compared with 12% in the country as a whole. And while other European destinations are suffering as budget airlines cut flight routes from the UK, Lanzarote is set to benefit, with Ryanair moving many of its planes to the Canaries and, along with Monarch, launching new routes this winter; from next summer, there will be new Jet2 services, too.

Away from the tourist resorts, there is a diverse range of properties for those who fancy a spot of self-sufficient isolation. A basic one-bedroom stone cottage on 2½ acres in Haria, with no mains electricity or water, is priced at £76,000, through Freedom4sale.com (928 346754); a two-bedroom farmhouse that runs on solar power, set in 1½ acres of vineyards and fruit trees in Tabayesco, is for sale at £258,000.

As Zoe Buchanan, who runs K2, an estate agency in Macher, 15 minutes inland from the capital, Arrecife, observes: “The further off the beaten track the property is, the more issues you may have with getting the correct paperwork to obtain mains water and electrics, which is why many owners go alternative.” She has spent the past 17 years renovating properties on Lanzarote, and her boyfriend, Benn Atkinson, supplies solar panels across the island.

Among the eco-friendly properties Buchanan has on her books is a renovated 200-year-old house in Tiagua, in central Lanzarote, with traditional Canarian thick stone walls, timber roof and high beamed ceilings — designed to be cool in summer and warm in winter — and a solar water heater, priced at £200,000. At the top end of the spectrum, on sale for £1.3m, is a beautifully restored four-bedroom house in Macher, on a 10,000 sq metre estate that is entirely self-sufficient, powered by 16 solar panels, two large windmills and a generator.

Their prices may vary dramatically, but the properties share a dramatic, isolated setting that is distinctively Lanzarote. Manrique called the island an “unframed, unmounted work of art”, and it’s that raw, natural beauty that draws buyers to this very different side of Spain. Buyers who want to be off the beaten track — and, most likely, off the grid, too.

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