Plaza de la Constitución (el Obelisco)

Las Palmas de Gran Canaria · Category: Architecture · Subcategory: Squares, streets & markets · Year: 1955

This square is set at the heart of a district that has had its shape drafted and planned over the years, with urban projects put forward by Echegarreta in 1883, Laureano Arroyo in 1898 and Fernando Navarro in 1911, yet had to wait until 1950 before it acquired the shape and personality that it displays today. While Secundino Zuazo had previously marked out the layout for the long wide avenue of the paseo de Tomás Morales in 1943, the square of the same name, which shares its name with La Constitución, had to wait a few more years until 1955 when the Town Hall decided to grace this junction between calle Pérez del Toro and calle Alfonso XIII with an ample garden roundabout, crowned in its middle with a huge, striking, and colourful stone obelisk, which soon led to it being known as the "obelisk square".

Towards the end of the 20th century, the square, along with its surrounding avenues, streets and smal squares nearby, was the setting for large popular concentrations and marches calling for citizens' freedoms, rights, and other wide ranging concerns of the islanders. It was also the site chosen for the commemoration of the Constitution in 1978, as a tribute to all those who gave everything so that equal rights could be a permanent part of everyday life, as one headline from pioneering Canary newspaper (El Atlante, from 1837) proclaimed, «A people are truly free where laws are in place and its men obey them». It would not be surprising then that Tomás Morales, had he been alive, would have felt enormously lucky to have given his name over to the square that would pay tribute to such a proclamation of freedom, which all creative spirits strive for. 

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