Hotel District

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Architecture · Subcategory: Squares, streets & markets · Year: 1890

The Hotel District is one of the most elegant and sumptuous urban areas of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Its majestic ensemble of eclectic and modernist buildings is unparalleled anywhere else in the islands. Urbanised during the last decade of the 19th century and the early 20th century, this city expansion was conceived under the innovative idea of a garden city, and from the outset was intended to be occupied by the high bourgeoisie of Santa Cruz. The result was an elegant and tranquil development that still today, despite some damage caused, retains excellent urban quality. 

The original boundaries of the district form practically a quadrilateral diagonally crossed by Avenida 25 de Julio. Its perimeter lines are: to the north, Numancia Street; to the south, Robayna and Costa y Grijalba Streets; to the east, Méndez Núñez Street; and to the west, Enrique Wolfson Street, above the Rambla.

The Hotel District is situated on the grounds of a large estate purchased in 1888 by the Sociedad de Edificaciones y Reformas Urbanas (S.E.R.U.) from the owner Eladio Roca. The developer's plan, devised by the architect Manuel de Cámara, was to create a new residential urbanisation of the garden city type, with a regular grid designed for two-storey single-family homes, complemented by ample service and leisure areas and diagonally crossed by a large avenue (Avenida 25 de Julio). From the beginning, the project was called the “Hotel District”, not because hotel facilities were intended to be built, but because what would be erected there were a range of grand manor-type buildings with gardens, which the French term “hôtel”.

The district began to be built with the construction in 1891 of a couple of large houses located at the corner of Santa Rita Street (now Viera y Clavijo) and General Antequera. The building known as “Fides” and the one on the other side of the street (now heavily altered and housing medical services) were the two constructions that set the model to be followed throughout the area.

The structure of the district was established in the Numancia-25 de Julio–Rambla-Viera y Clavijo (formerly Santa Rita)-Robayna stretch, elongating the blocks and placing single-family buildings with garden surroundings in them, leaving a large area behind the houses, which provided splendid privacy at the rear of the built plots.

Urbanisation works quickly gained good momentum and thus the stretch of Santa Rita Street (now Viera y Clavijo) from Méndez Núñez to the Rambla was cobbled and sewered in 1901. This avenue would house characteristic buildings such as what would later become the Town Hall (1898) or Casa Foronda (1910). Around Plaza de los Patos (1905) were built the former Pompeya Clinic (1905), Castelo Pharmacy (1905), the Anglican church (1905) and the magnificent Martí Dehesa mansion (1912). Slightly further up appeared the imaginative Casa Quintero (1905) and the luxurious Hotel Battenberg (1902), now disappeared, facing the Rambla opposite the statue of Captain Diego Fernández Ortega (1915). On the other hand, Numancia Street was already urbanised at the turn of the century up to its junction with the Rambla. From here, new roads (Jesús y María, 25 de Julio...) designed with sufficient width for the new motor vehicle traffic, penetrated the urban fabric of the new development. 

With the outbreak of the First World War, the area, already urbanised in its most characteristic part, suffered a construction halt that lasted until the late 1920s. It was around this time that buildings appeared in a new groundbreaking and avant-garde style: rationalism. This novel architecture, with its straight lines, regular plans and façades free of superfluous ornamentation, fitted into this very different stylistic space with astonishing naturalness. Notable works from this period include the Pérez Alcalde houses (1933) and García Morales (1934), or the magnificent Edificio Arroyo (1937), to name a few examples.

After the Civil War, the Hotel District broke its original perimeter, expanding southwards to the Rambla de Pulido. At that time, vernacular style prevailed; the new plots were predominantly occupied by buildings of marked regionalist style.

Despite some architectural missteps committed in the area during the last decades of the 20th century, today the Hotel District retains much of its original elegance and grandeur. It was declared a Bien de Interés Cultural (BIC) (Asset of Cultural Interest) in 2007, extending its protection range seven years later with the addition of new adjacent areas of urban interest (Pino de Oro). 

Today the Hotel District continues to surprise with its elegant appearance and it is enough to stroll through its secluded streets with their splendid buildings to realise that we are in an area of extraordinary urban quality.

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