Añaza Neighbourhood

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Architecture · Subcategory: Squares, streets & markets · Year: 1989

Añaza is one of the most distinctive population entities in all of Santa Cruz. Despite having a reputation as a troubled neighbourhood, the truth is that over the years it has transformed into an area equipped with everything necessary for its inhabitants to lead a dignified life, not very different from any other part of the city centre.

The neighbourhood is located on land ceded by the municipality of El Rosario to Santa Cruz in 1972 and urbanised in the following decade, with the aim of settling a population with limited economic resources there. Today Añaza is the most important population centre in the Southwest District, occupying the land between the course of the Barranco del Muerto to the north; the sea to the east; the Barranco de Los Pocitos to the south; and the TF-1 motorway to the west; all approximately eight kilometres from Plaza de España, the urban centre of Santa Cruz.

Añaza arose as a solution to the lack of developable land that the city faced at the end of the 1970s. In 1981, four large estates in the area were purchased with the aim of urbanising them with quality criteria: low density, garden areas, wide and spacious roads, broad pavements, green spaces and facilities to meet the needs of a human community that, scattered throughout the urban geography of Santa Cruz, lived in very precarious conditions.

It was in September 1985 when the urbanisation works proposed in the Partial Plan drafted three years earlier and approved the previous year by the Town Hall began. The first social housing buildings were erected in 1988, located to the west of the central avenue, and were occupied the following year by a population coming from shanties and caves in the Barranco de Santos and other degraded enclaves of the old town of Santa Cruz. However, the neighbourhood still lacked all the basic infrastructure for daily life, which led to high levels of marginalisation in these early years.

In the 1990s things began to change gradually. The lack of roots, deficient community life habits and neighbourhood coexistence problems began to ease after the appearance of the 8 de Marzo de Añaza Neighbourhood Association, a community that achieved important neighbourhood demands such as the installation of some basic services the neighbourhood lacked: waste collection, police station, schools, nurseries, cultural spaces (library) and sports facilities (football pitch), etc.

The opening in 1993 of the Santa Cruz shopping centre near the neighbourhood boosted the entire area economically, although this major private initiative was not located in the heart of the neighbourhood but on its periphery.

Be that as it may, Añaza is a fully consolidated urban entity within the social fabric of Santa Cruz and, although sometimes still stigmatised by old prejudices, today it has a clear identity, as well as being a clear example of urban quality outside what is considered the city’s nerve centre.

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