Isabel II Battery

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Memory · Subcategory: Sites of memory · Year: S. XVIII

This battery formed, together with the Carnicería battery, the defensive system devised in the mid-18th century to protect the coastline between the mouths of the Aceite ( Barranquillo ) and Santos ravines. 

The Isabel II battery, renamed as such in the mid-19th century after its refurbishment, was located on the left bank of the mouth of the Santos ravine. It was nothing more than a gun emplacement opened in the wall that fell into the ravine. For its operation, a guardhouse with two sections was built on a concrete platform, with a slab floor and a roof made of pinewood beams.

Also known as the Santos Ravine battery, this defensive installation protected the mouth of the city's largest ravine. Its total area covered 348 square metres and it overlooked its twin, the Carnicería battery, about 50 metres to the north.

On 26 April 1910, the Isabel II battery and the adjacent land were ceded to the Compañía Eléctrica Industrial de Tenerife (Industrial Electric Company of Tenerife), which demolished it three years later. Today, the land where this small defensive installation once stood remains the property of an electric company which, under a different name, has installed a substation there.

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