Delphic Apollo (House of Bartolomé Cairasco de Figueroa)

Las Palmas de Gran Canaria · Category: Memory · Subcategory: Historic sites · Year: 1580

The poet, musician and humanist Bartolomé Cairasco de Figueroa (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1538-1610), organised around 1580 in the garden-orchard of his own house on the old San Francisco street, very close to the square and monument that today bear his name, a literary gathering; the first to arise in the islands.

This space was Cairasco's private Parnassus, that place in Greek mythology where the muses dwelled and the homeland of poets. That orchard became the Academy of the Garden dedicated to Delphic Apollo , in evocation of the classical world, so admired by the Renaissance. It brought together the most select intellectuals of the Archipelago in the last third of the 16th century. Personalities of cultural stature such as Silvestre de Balboa, Basilio de Peñalosa, Antonio de Viana, the engineer Leonardo Torriani, Juan de la Cuesta, Alonso de Espinosa, Abréu Galindo, Gonzalo Argote de Molina or Luis Pacheco de Narrváez gathered there.  

We imagine long evenings in that garden, accompanied by good weather, splendid vegetation and long conversations where each participant, with their pseudonym as was customary (Cairasco's was Ergasto ), presented their arguments, ideas and projects.

The magnificent house was inherited by his father from an uncle, a sugar merchant, and later by Bartolomé himself. The large residence with garden and orchard was located in what was then the nascent Triana neighbourhood, on the site that from 1664 would be occupied by the convent of the nuns of Santa Clara.

It was in that old manor house where Cairasco himself, together with the captain of the city militias, Antonio Lorenzo, negotiated in 1599 the conditions for the city of Las Palmas, then occupied by the invading forces of the Dutch corsair Pieter Van der Does, to be spared. The talks reached no agreement due to the enormous demands imposed by the invader when requesting ransom. After the failed negotiations, the Dutch proceeded mercilessly to sack and burn Las Palmas. Cairasco's house, where the first Canarian literary gathering took place, was destroyed, as happened with many others in the area.

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