Manor house on Caleta Street

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Memory · Subcategory: Sites of memory · Year: 1810

At the beginning of 1810, Infantry Lieutenant Colonel José de Monteverde y Molina (Garachico, 1756-La Laguna, 1831), governor of the main fortress of Santa Cruz and author of one of the most important reports on the events of Nelson's attack on the city, ordered the construction of a large manor house on the old Caleta Street, today General Gutiérrez, intended for rental income. Its main tenants were wealthy foreign merchants who often spent long periods in Santa Cruz attending to their own businesses. 

The building occupied an extensive plot near the coastline. Previously, another large mansion had existed there, which was completely destroyed by the terrible fire that occurred in Santa Cruz on the night of 28 September 1784; one of the most devastating in the city's entire history.

The new construction, built in 1810, according to chroniclers of the time, was extraordinary . It featured a beautiful façade that gave access to two spacious independent dwellings, in the style of Spanish houses . The building also had a ground floor warehouse and a cistern or water tank for storing rainwater.

One of the first tenants of this splendid building, now disappeared along with the rest of the old street, was a wealthy merchant employed by the India Company. This merchant paid one thousand three hundred pesos per year in rent, a fortune at the time.

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