Gesta 25 de Julio School

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Architecture · Subcategory: Civil architecture · Year: 1959

The Gesta 25 de Julio infant and primary education centre (CEIP) was born from the merger, in 2015, of two different public schools that were very close to each other, right in the Barrio de la Salud: CEIP 25 de Julio and CEIP Rodríguez Galván. The first is the oldest, known at the time as Grupo Escolar 25 de Julio, inaugurated in 1959 as a public educational centre intended to meet the growing educational demand of the Barrio de la Salud, which was then beginning its demographic expansion.

Built on land where banana plants abounded and cows grazed, the school initially had six classrooms; with boys and girls in separate classrooms. Later it was called Colegio Nacional Femenino 25 de Julio, until in 1984 it definitively became a mixed-gender school.

The school building is organised around a large central courtyard that distributes all the interior spaces open to it. 

The centre has been characterised by hard work, the quality of teaching provided, and the educational values transmitted to the students throughout more than sixty years of its history. In 1969 and under the direction of Manuel Borguño, the school choir won the first National Prize for School Choirs of Spain. 

On the other hand, this school was the first centre in the Canary Islands to integrate, during the 1992-93 academic year, students with motor disabilities, a very important challenge for the teaching staff and the Educational Community, as it faced a novel integration in the classrooms, which led to significant works to eliminate barriers throughout the centre. 

The school was also one of the first centres in Santa Cruz to present an interculturality project, motivated by the high number of foreign students who have enrolled in recent years. The Barrio de la Salud has always been a place of settlement for immigrants, initially from the interior of the island or other islands of the Archipelago, and for several decades, from people arriving from other latitudes. The school, as it has always done, has provided an appropriate response to cultural diversity and integration in such a populous neighbourhood.

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