Municipal Slaughterhouse

Las Palmas de Gran Canaria · Category: Memory · Subcategory: Memory spaces · Year: 1860 · Authors: Manuel de Oraá

The city of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria first had a proper market square in the advanced year of 1787. With a market that aimed, above all, to restrict street vending and simultaneously shape a more civilised way of life, as had historically been done in mainland Spain. To this end, the corregidor José Eguiluz took the initiative to gather a good number of merchants in one corner of the town, at a single point of sale, on the left bank of the mouth of the Guiniguada ravine.

This measure would, over time, be the seed of a more ambitious project that would come in the form of a building in the 19th century. The city, then essentially composed of the neighbourhoods of Triana and Vegueta, became accustomed to having this sales point nearby and it seemed ideal that it should be precisely there where the great market square that the city deserved would be built.

The Las Palmas market was a public initiative aimed at turning this part of the town into a commercial hub with the intention of giving the city a stable civic centre. At that time, in 1840-1850, the city had no architectural attraction to give it a public image, and except for religious centres, especially the Cathedral, and the stately homes contained in the Vegueta neighbourhood, there were few other landmarks in the capital area. The Town Halls as we know them today had not yet been built, nor the Pérez Galdós Theatre, and urban redevelopment was led by the demolition, to obtain plots, of the old convents affected by the disentailment. Thus, the construction of a market precisely at that point, at the ravine mouth, on the boundary between the Vegueta and Triana neighbourhoods, inevitably established the starting point of the longed-for social centre of the new city. There, over time, not only the market would be built, but also the fishmongers (1874), the municipal slaughterhouse (1860), the wooden bridge (1862) and the Tirso de Molina theatre (1890) which a few years later, in 1900, would be renamed Pérez Galdós. [Extracted from Gran Canaria Gourmet]

The slaughterhouse, designed by the architect Manuel de Oráa in 1860, was built next to the market and consisted of a simple one-storey building, accessed through a door finished with a semicircular arch, harmonised with the pair of windows on either side. The side walls of the building also had semicircular windows; only the rear façade was different, with a door and two elongated openings whose height was less than their width. The interior was divided into three areas, two of which flanked the elongated entrance hall that led to the main enclosure, with a four-sided pitched roof, while the first area was closed by a flat roof. The work was directed by the master builder Manuel González, assisted by the stonemason Manuel Pérez and the carpenter José Curbelo.

Juan José Laforet, official chronicler of the city, offers an explanation about the disappeared Pago de las Tenerías, a neighbourhood located on the road from San Cristóbal to San José when the current residential estate was a sea of banana plantations. "Las Tenerías were a few houses where people lived who were dedicated to tanning the hides of the cattle slaughtered in the nearby Vegueta slaughterhouse. It was an area known for the bad smell emitted by the hides and which eventually disappeared due to the expansion of the Vega de San José and the motorway."

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