Old Town Halls

Las Palmas de Gran Canaria · Category: Memory · Subcategory: Historic sites · Year: 1518 · Authors: Pedro de Llerena, Juan de Palacios

On the site now occupied by the current Town Hall of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, at the upper part of Santa Ana square, there was a 16th-century building that served for more than three hundred years as the seat of the old Island Council and the Royal Audience, which completely disappeared due to a terrible and intriguing fire that occurred in 1842. 

The old Town Halls are only visually known to us through scarce graphic information: a drawing made by Pedro Agustín del Castillo in 1686; another by José Álvarez Rixo, from the early 19th century; that of Benito Pérez Galdós, who could hardly have seen the building as he was born a year after the disaster; and the last, perhaps the most convincing, an illustration by an anonymous author.

The first house where the Council held its meetings was already built in 1505 on the "upper street or wide street that goes from the audience to the sea", behind the cathedral of Santa Ana. But the council did not remain here long, as we know that from 1511, during the governorship of Lope de Sosa, it was decided to build a new seat on the land located opposite the Cathedral's portal, on the edge of what would become the "main square", an urban representative place where the de facto powers of that time were established: the religious and the political.

The new Town Halls of Santa Ana square were already completed shortly before January 1519, although the building was remodelled and enlarged between 1537 and 1543, under the governorship of Agustín de Zurbarán. It was a two-storey building raised on a rectangular plan with a large central courtyard. On the ground floor were the public jail, granary, flour weighing station, and regiment; on the upper floor was the Municipal Council and also, from 1527, the Royal Audience.

The excellent façade was built with yellow sandstone ashlar and smooth walls raised with rubble. It had an interesting structure of a double portico gallery: on the ground floor with seven arches supported by Tuscan columns; on the upper floor, three arches of similar design to the lower ones and placed on the same axis as these, closed by a stone balustrade with carved balusters that formed a wide balcony. The appearance of the main flank of the building, the one facing the square, was crowned by a stone balustrade that presented in the centre the coat of arms of Gran Canaria. The coat of arms of Castile could be seen on the left side of the façade, next to a window of clear Gothic style with tracery. 

The authorship of this magnificent building, which showed very interesting artistic elements between Gothic and Renaissance, is not clear. Some specialists suggest that the original building was the work of master Pedro de Llerena and his stonemason assistants, Pedro Carmona and Agustín Gutiérrez. Others attribute the reform and enlargement of the building to Juan de Palacios.

The building stood for more than three hundred years until the fire of 1842 completely destroyed it. On its site, the new town hall with a classicist façade that we can see today was built.

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