The Cabin on the Peña de la Gaviota

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

The cabin on the Peña of La Gaviota was an eloquent example, but was taken down to make way for the new main road around El Rincón. References to it abound on Facebook, such as at Las Palmas ayer y hoy, as well as on Flickr and Panoramio. Photos can be uploaded onto these, in memory of the house perched on a rock on the edge of the city, which was isolated from the rest of the island at high tide, and used by large communities of users. 

According to a number of internet users, the cabin on Peña de la Gaviota must have been built towards the end of the 1950s by a fireman. Many describe it as a childhood house of adventures for young kids as they would be sitting in the back seat of the car driving up the North Motorway, and looking out of the window to catch a fleeting sight of this idiosyncratic element of Las Palmas' landscape, which would then stick in their minds and let their imagination run riot. 

"So near but yet so far", according to journalist Marisol Ayala in an entry made in her blog. The cabin on the Peña de la Gaviota had been built over an enormous rock with planks painted light blue. It had a gabled roof, with a fence and a wooden and roped walkway joining it to the beach of El Rincón.

Despite it having a whole host of arcane images making it look like it was a world apart, it lives on in the collective memory as a quite curious spot, an image of a man who would be separated from the rest of the city by the sea, as one internet user puts it, "hid himself away" to be alone with his own memories. 

[...] Around that time the cabin on the Peña de la Gaviota rose above the sea like a landmark over the northern border of Las Palmas. Then along came the road building and the cabin was knocked down, and the rock was buried as the city expanded. There are still frequent allusions made to this age old image, that lives long in the memory. 

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