Calle del Sol (Dr. Allart)

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Architecture · Subcategory: Squares, streets & markets · Year: S. XVI

This old street already appears on the map of Santa Cruz made in 1588 by the engineer Leonardo Torriani. It shows its perpendicular development from the Caleta de Blas Díaz towards the interior of a terrain where some buildings are scattered amid wastelands.

Its name, del Sol, is already documented in 1664, surely coined because the street is oriented exactly from east to west. 

The importance of this street grew throughout the 18th century, when the path up to La Laguna via the hermitage of San Sebastián was abandoned, and the new route of the Puente Zurita (1754) was chosen. Calle del Sol became the start of this new path that departed from the nearby Caleta. 

It was then that shops, warehouses, markets, cellars and various industries appeared on the street, with its intense traffic. The first printing press opened in the Canary Islands was installed here, as well as numerous warehouses for highly flammable goods related to port activities (wood, ropes, oils), as was evident in 1784 when one of the largest fires in the city occurred in this area. Years later, in 1814, on the upper floors of one of the large houses built on this street after the fire, the first Provincial Council of the Canary Islands was established.

In 1821 the street had 21 businesses, the third busiest commercial street in the city, after Castillo and Las Tiendas streets. The importance of Calle del Sol is evident in the fact that it was one of the first streets in the town to have public lighting. During the 19th century, carriage traffic was so intense that in 1887 the City Council established the first traffic signs, making the street one-way downwards and Calle del Castillo upwards.

Calle del Sol was definitively cobbled in 1896 and three years later, in 1899, it permanently changed its name to Dr. Allart, in honour of Jean Baptiste Allart (1831-1906), doctor and Belgian Consul General in the Canary Islands, one of the main promoters of the installation of the tramway in Tenerife.

Already in the 20th century, after the opening of the lower part of Imeldo Serís street and the enormous activity of its other parallel to the north, Calle del Castillo, the now Dr. Allart street entered a slow decline. Today, pedestrianised, the street maintains along its entire length some buildings of great interest, although almost all are in a lamentable state of maintenance.

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