Salamanca Neighbourhood

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Architecture · Subcategory: Squares, streets & markets · Year: 1901

Salamanca is one of the most characteristic neighbourhoods of all the population entities that Santa Cruz de Tenerife has. Developed throughout the 20th century, it began as a suburban layout located in the upper part of the city at that time. Today fully integrated into the urban fabric, it presents itself as a middle-class neighbourhood that, despite having suffered fierce urban pressure, barely maintains examples of historical interest such as: terraced houses in an eclectic style; century-old facilities still in service (water tanks, electrical transformers, school groups); constructions with marked modernist, rationalist and regionalist styles; and some works of the best contemporary architecture.

The land on which the neighbourhood is settled was known since at least 1549 as “Llanos de Salamanca”, having been owned by Francisco de Salamanca, a merchant and pilot of the Indies trade route. These were wastelands where some fig trees grew, and when the Zurita bridge was built in the mid-18th century, these lands were completely unpopulated. So much so that years later, in 1810, with a terrible yellow fever epidemic ravaging Santa Cruz, quarantine barracks were installed here. In the mid-19th century, a manor house with a splendid garden was erected in the lower area of what would later be the neighbourhood, in its northeast sector; neither of these elements remain today. But the depopulated and rural character of this whole area was maintained until the end of the century, as evidenced by the fact that in 1898 it was a place where pigs grazed and were raised.

At the beginning of the 20th century, it was considered that these lands situated above the urban centre of Santa Cruz were suitable for establishing a neighbourhood intended to house the city's working classes. In 1901, the architect Manuel de Cámara dreamed of a new neighbourhood here where the less affluent could enjoy avenues, tree-lined streets and houses with gardens. These were dreams never realised. During the first two decades of the 20th century, opulent constructions with showy façades featuring modernist elements began to be built on the west pavement of the Rambla, between the Plaza de Toros and the La Asunción bridge. Streets were planned perpendicular to the Rambla where, uphill, modest one- or two-storey houses of marked eclectic character appeared. Additionally, around this time, some urban service facilities were built such as water tanks and a tower for the new electrical wiring. At the end of the twenties, a large housing group, the Ley neighbourhood, designed by the architect Antonio Pintor, was completed. The urban sector between the Rambla and Salamanca street was more or less finished around 1930.


Regarding the upper part of the neighbourhood, above Salamanca street, we know that already during the twenties two construction companies (the Sociedad Cooperativa de Producción and the Sociedad de Construcción Casas Baratas) were opening new streets and laying out blocks where modest single-family houses of the “garden city” type were built. This new sector was called “Salamanca Chica”. During the early thirties, a public school was inaugurated in this area and some examples of the new rationalist architecture began to be built. After the Civil War, balconies of Canarian typology and tiles began to flourish throughout the neighbourhood. In the fifties, the parish of Nuestra Señora de Fátima was built, contemporary with the “modern” work designed by the famous architect Alberto Sartoris for the commercial firm Hernández Hermanos, located on the edge of the Santos ravine, very close to the Zurita bridge.
 
During the sixties, seventies and eighties, the urban development pressure on the neighbourhood was brutal. Narrow streets that had buildings of one or two storeys at most suddenly found themselves literally suffocated as the heights of new constructions quintupled.
 
Despite everything, today the Salamanca neighbourhood preserves some spaces with evident heritage values. The area, with its characteristic aspects, is now a place of great activity and vibrant dynamism within the varied urban fabric of Santa Cruz.

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