Andamana Street

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

What do the Suez Canal, Perestroika, the Sahara war and globalisation have in common? A Canarian production [Estación Andamana] answers these questions, with the perspective granted by the evolution of the Port in recent decades. There, in La Luz, the answers are found. Its history highlights the peculiar connections that the popular Andamana Street maintained with the docks, in the La Isleta neighbourhood.

With the closure of the Suez Canal at the end of the 1950s, as a consequence of the war between Egypt and Israel, Japanese, Korean and Russian fishing boats discovered they could find abundant catches (octopus or squid, among others) in the Canarian-Saharan bank. Ships of all flags began arriving at La Luz: activity at the dock soared, and the Port found a starting point for its expansion, in years that dock regulars remember as its golden years.

Many of those sailors were received by the brothels of Andamana, a street which, at the exit mouth of the port enclosure, enjoyed an unbeatable strategic position. The doorways of the classic terraced houses of La Isleta filled with women who smoked, offering their services. What was less known, outside that environment, was the identity of the owners of some of those lively establishments. Several Eastern entrepreneurs, who arrived on the Island due to their fishing activity, began managing them as a thriving business.

Many Canarian women worked there, but also the first South American immigrants, and even some Northern European tourists who, without money, became trapped on the Island and sought a way out this way.

Prostitutes, sex and alcohol defined the early years of that boom in Andamana, where clients of many nationalities met. None, they say, drank as much as the Russians, who arrived in their fishing fleet and even bought barrels of pharmaceutical ethyl alcohol for their notorious land parties. Entering the 1980s, drugs marked the subsequent decline of the area.

Its current state is abandonment, a piece of ghost town, full of "for sale" signs, sealed doors and windows, and no sign of the activity it received in past times. Its future is disappearance, affected in urban plans by the ring road to La Isleta, whose construction, for now, has been frozen by the current economic crisis.

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