Casa Falcón (former Hotel Europa)

Las Palmas de Gran Canaria · Category: Architecture · Subcategory: Civil architecture · Year: c. 1810

On one of the two corners formed by Remedios and Peregrina streets, in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, stands a large mansion that once housed the "Hotel Europa", one of the few establishments of this kind that the city possessed in the mid-last century. It is a two-storey building whose main façade faces the Hurtado de Mendoza square.

The interior of the house undoubtedly offers more interest than its façade. The main space corresponds to a neoclassical-oriented patio. Its square plan is flanked by four columns aligned on each of the longer sides, supporting wide wooden lowered arches or openings that form a body with the upper floor gallery. The jewel of the house is a stone and wood staircase that must be included among the most beautiful preserved in the old architecture of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Supported on carefully carved stone openings in their profiles, the staircase offers a daring architectural solution in its function of providing access to the gallery and upper rooms at the rear of the house. The elegant balustrade on a tea wood baluster is a sign that evidences the stately character of this construction.

This house constitutes a good example of the neoclassical trend architecture that dominated domestic construction in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria during the 19th century.

We know that in 1835 this house was inhabited by Don Antonio Jacinto Falcón, an important landowner born in the city, whose surname we use to identify the building.

When the English traveller Olivia Stone visited Gran Canaria (resulting from her trip to the Canary Islands was the publication of "Tenerife and its six satellites", an important work for understanding the archipelago in the last third of the 19th century), around 1870, the mansion had become the Hotel Europa and she stayed there. This hotel was one of several hotel establishments in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria intended to accommodate the first significant influx of tourists, mostly English, that the city already had in the 19th century. Opposite it was the "Monopole", another old mansion transformed into a hotel that maintained this function until about a quarter of a century ago.

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