Building of the Port Workers' Organisation (OTP)

Las Palmas de Gran Canaria · Category: Architecture · Subcategory: Civil architecture · Year: 1948

The building of the Port Workers' Organisation (OTP), built in the 1940s with funds from the former Monte Pío of the port workers, is currently occupied by the North Police Station of the National Police. Since 2002 there has been a Heritage Committee for the La Isleta neighbourhood, which demands that the administration allocate the building for social and cultural uses.

Before the building existed, port workers lacked a meeting place, services, and even a space to eat in the shade. An adjacent mural narrates the working conditions of the guild, on a wall that now shelters the mobile police park. In 1946, the Port Works Board ceded the plot to the Ministry of Labour to address social deficiencies. Until then, the concession was in favour of Club Victoria, which had the old Pepe Gonçalvez football pitch there.

The building, today declared a Bien de Interés Cultural (BIC) (Asset of Cultural Interest), was inaugurated in 1948 and served, besides organising work lists, to provide medical care, a library, and a dining room. It had leisure spaces, showers, and dormitories, where stevedores from the island's inland villages stayed.

In 1986 the OTP disappeared by decree, replaced by the company Sestiba. Nevertheless, the building maintained its functions until 1988, the year in which the Treasury assumed the OTP's assets. Years of abandonment followed, until in 1993 it passed from Ministry to Ministry, to the Ministry of the Interior, which did not convert it into a police station until 2004, relocating the station that was near Parque Santa Catalina, on Miguel Rosas street.

From a formal point of view, it is a building of the autarkic era that stands out on the façade for two important elements: the access portico under a porch with four pillars and openings framed in ashlar between pilasters and cornice crowned by a pediment, and the solid tower at the NE corner in ashlar with a rectangular opening that bites into the corner. Inside there is a porticoed courtyard with a semicircular arcade between pillars and Tuscan columns.

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