Workation Villa in Lanzarote: A Real Home Office, 1Gb WiFi

If you have ever rented a holiday villa for a workation and ended up bent over a kitchen table on dropping WiFi, you already know the problem. A long-running Lanzarote rental forum thread puts it bluntly: “very few rental villas have high speed broadband, which has been a persistent challenge for remote workers seeking short-term accommodations on the island.” That is the problem we set out to solve when we built the workspace at Casa Los Alisios.

This post is the tour. What the office actually looks like, how the connectivity is set up, and who the villa is the right fit for: solo remote workers, couples on a workation week, families where one parent is working, and small teams running an offsite.

Why a villa beats coliving for serious remote work in Lanzarote

Lanzarote has a few coliving options. Pitaya in Arrecife and The Nomad Cave in Charco de San Ginés are the obvious ones, plus surf-and-coliving packages from Coworksurf out of Famara. They are good for solo nomads who want a built-in social scene and do not mind a shared kitchen or a desk in a communal room.

A private villa works better when:

• You take video calls and need a closed door rather than a shared coworking floor.
• You travel with a partner or family and need separate sleep and work spaces.
• You want a kitchen you control for race-week or training-week nutrition.
• You want to be a 10 minute walk from a sea swim rather than a 30 minute drive.
• You are a small team running an offsite and need everyone under one roof.

Casa Los Alisios is a 3-bedroom villa in a quiet residential community in Costa Teguise, sleeps 6, single level with no stairs, and rents from 126 EUR per night. The whole point of the home-office build was to make it work for a real working week, not just for a long weekend.

The home office at Casa Los Alisios: full setup and specs

The dedicated workspace is in the studio bedroom. It works as both an office during the day and a guest bedroom at night thanks to a wrought-iron daybed. The setup:

• Motorised sit-stand desk. Switches between sitting and standing height at the press of a button. Standing for the morning admin block, sitting for the long deep-work session in the afternoon. Photos: desk raised and desk lowered.
• Ikea Markus ergonomic chair. High-back mesh, the standard Ikea office chair that has lasted long enough to become the de facto remote-work chair. Better than every kitchen-table dining chair we have ever used in a rental.
• Cat6 ethernet at the desk. Wired backhaul to the main router. The most reliable way to make a video call hold up through any background congestion.
• Sonos speaker. Background music or focus sound during work blocks.
• Natural light. The studio is one of the brightest rooms in the villa, so the light hits you on calls rather than turning you into a silhouette.
• Fan cooling. The villa runs on fans rather than air conditioning. Costa Teguise sits in the trade wind and night cooling does most of the work; fans handle the rest.

The 86 inch LG TV: a second screen, an offsite presentation wall, a cinema

The living room has an 86 inch LG smart TV that earns its space three different ways during a workation week.

As a second monitor: plug a laptop into the HDMI input or cast wirelessly from the smart TV’s built-in apps and you have a screen large enough to keep Slack, a code repo and a video call open at the same time. For long deep-work sessions where you need real estate, sit on the sofa, dock the laptop on the coffee table and use the TV as the main display.

As an offsite presentation wall: if you are running a small team retreat at the villa, the 86 inches is comfortable from the sofa for everyone in a 6-person room. Put a deck up, run a planning session, present a customer call recording, do a Loom debrief. The Sonos pairs with the TV for clean meeting audio.

At the end of the day it goes back to being a cinema TV. Streaming apps are built in, the picture is calibrated for film, and the living room is open to the terrace, which is the right shape for a Friday-night project wrap-up.

How fast is the WiFi, really?

This is the question every remote worker actually asks before booking a villa. The honest answer:

• 1 Gb fibre line into the property.
• TP-Link Deco mesh distributes the signal to every room of the villa and out to the terraces.
• Cat6 ethernet at the desk for the times when WiFi is not enough. A wired connection is what you want for a high-stakes video call, a large file upload, or a screen-share where you cannot afford a frame drop.
• Backup connection. A second line keeps the network up if the main fibre drops, so an outage during a meeting does not end the meeting.

Speed test on arrival to see what your visit’s actual download is. Spotify works, Zoom works, Loom works, large code pulls work. Most guests do not think about the network after day one.

Time zone, daylight and weather for video calls

Lanzarote runs on Western European Time, the same zone as the UK, Ireland and Portugal. That is one hour behind mainland Spain, three hours behind Eastern European time, and three to six hours ahead of the US (depending on US time-zone). What that means for working hours:

• An 09:00 Lanzarote start is 09:00 London, 10:00 Berlin, 04:00 New York. Easy overlap with Europe, deep-work block before the US wakes up.
• A 16:00 Lanzarote stand-up catches London end-of-day, Berlin late-afternoon and US East Coast morning. Same shape as a London-based remote worker.
• Daylight runs roughly 07:50 to 18:15 in midwinter and 07:00 to 21:00 in midsummer. The light is bright and even in every month, the trade wind keeps daytime temperatures broadly between about 19 °C and 28 °C, and there are no real winter dark afternoons. Natural light on video calls every month.

The trade wind drops in early summer mornings, which makes the early-morning block the most consistently quiet for outdoor work on the terrace.

Walking distance: what is around the desk

A workation week is mostly about the boring stuff working. Within walking distance of the front door:

• Spar supermarket: 3 minutes’ walk. Bread, fruit, the basic shop, plus a deli counter for lunch.
• Lidl: 10 minutes’ walk. Bigger weekly shop.
• Playa El Ancla: 10 minutes’ walk. Sheltered cove, calm water for a morning open water swim or sunrise dip before the workday.
• Playa del Jablillo: 20 minutes’ walk. The calmest sea swim on this stretch of coast.
• Communal pool, padel and tennis: 2 minutes’ walk inside the residential community.
• Pueblo Marinero: 30 minutes’ walk along the coastal promenade. Restaurants, craft markets on Wednesdays and Fridays, evening reset.

The car is for the airport (15 min), Teguise town and the Sunday market (10 min), La Geria wine country (20 min), and Timanfaya National Park (30 min). For a normal workation week you barely need it.

Backup work spots: cafés in Costa Teguise

Sometimes you want to leave the house. The cafés in Costa Teguise that work well as a change-of-scenery desk:

• Cactus Surf and Coffee on the seafront promenade. Surf-school annexe, espresso-led menu, breakfast bocadillos and homemade banana bread. Open mornings and lunch only.
• Bonbon Café. Brunch staple in the centre, crepes and pancakes, full breakfast menu.
• Greens. Healthier-end café, breakfast and poke bowls, easy on the body during a training week.
• The Cake Shop in Pueblo Marinero. Central, good coffee, the place to take a break and not get back to the laptop.

None of these are replacements for the home office. They are the places to walk to mid-afternoon when you have wrapped a deep-work block and want to do email-and-catch-up over a cortado. For a proper coworking day pass, the closest formal options are Coworking Guru in Teguise town (10 min drive), The Square Coworking and Lanzarote Coworking in Arrecife (15 min drive), and Coworking Lanzarote in Playa Honda by the airport (15 min drive).

Workation, family workation or team retreat: who Casa Los Alisios fits

The villa sleeps 6 in 3 bedrooms (1 king, 2 singles, 1 slide-out double on the office daybed). Three configurations work well:

• Solo or couple workation. One person works from the studio office, the other has the run of the villa. The single-level layout means the worker is not stuck behind a closed door all day.
• Family workation. One parent works, kids are at the community pool, padel court or playground 2 minutes’ walk away. The villa has a cot and high chair on request. Arenas International School is in Costa Teguise itself and the British School of Lanzarote is around 10 minutes by car in Tahiche, which opens up term-time stays if you want a longer move with school continuity.
• Small team retreat (up to 6). All hands under one roof, shared kitchen, big living room with the 86 inch TV for offsite presentations, terraces for breakouts, beach and bike rides for the team-building part. Cheaper than a hotel block and much better for actual focus.

Booking and what to know before you fly

• Minimum stay: usually 5 nights low season, 7 nights high season. Long workation stays of 4+ weeks are negotiated directly.
• Price: from 126 EUR per night. Weekly and monthly rates available on request.
• Direct contact: Maria José, +34 600 005 872, or via the contact form on casalosalisios.com.
• Listings: Airbnb and Booking.com.
• Practical landing day: pick up a Spanish SIM at the airport (the major Spanish carriers have shops in the terminal) or use eSIM, the airport is 15 minutes by car or taxi from the villa, and the WiFi password and arrival notes are in the welcome book at the villa.

If you have specific connectivity questions, gear-storage or bike-storage needs, or a team-retreat brief, message us first rather than booking blind. The villa works well for serious remote work because the home-office build was the brief, but every guest’s setup is slightly different and we would rather flag a poor fit before you arrive than after.