"Old" San Felipe Battery or Redoubt

Las Palmas de Gran Canaria · Category: Memory · Subcategory: Memory spaces · Year: 1703

This battery is known as the "old" one because a more modern battery with the same name was built in the mid-18th century in a different location (on the wall, very close to the Triana Gate). 

The one we now discuss, the oldest, seems to have existed shortly after the Dutch attack of 1599. It was located not far from where the invaders landed, on the Guanarteme hill, above the Santa Catalina tower, in a sandy and windy area. It seems that shortly after its construction it was abandoned. 

But the point where it had existed was very important for defence and in 1702, during the Spanish War of Succession, the site was taken up again as a strategic point. Therefore, the Commander General Miguel González de Otanzo, faced with external threats, decided to build a new battery on the remains of the previous one. 

The following year, under the direction of the island's senior ensign, Pedro Agustín del Castillo, the redoubt began to be built, and during the excavation works a series of aboriginal tombs were discovered which were studied by Del Castillo himself, a person very interested in the Island's pre-Hispanic past.  

The old San Felipe battery was a structure with a walled front, bastions and an open gorge through which the magazine was accessed; at the other end stood a slender guard sentry box.

We know that in 1737 the redoubt was armed with no less than 12 cannons, although by the end of the 18th century the entire structure was in a deplorable state.

Nothing remains today of this military infrastructure. It is assumed that the urban expansion of the city, at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries over the sandy area where it once stood, left no trace of the old redoubt.

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