Los Platillos Landing Stage

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Architecture · Subcategory: Industrial architecture · Year: 1787

This small piece of construction is all that remains of the old Santa Cruz de Tenerife pier. Rebuilt under the supervision of the military engineer Andrés Amat de Tortosa in 1787, the pier consisted of a wide and solid breakwater perpendicular to the coast, topped by a crescent-shaped hammer, sheltered by which these interlaced stairs were installed that still endure today and facilitated passenger traffic.

Embarking and disembarking people here was often a dangerous act, as demonstrated by the French traveller Bory de Saint-Vincent around 1800 who wrote: "The disembarkation is done on the inner side, by means of some steps where there is always surf, even in calm weather. I have seen few more dangerous landing stages than this one: the wave, broken by the tip of the pier, flows back into the bend with such force that it breaks the boat. Only with great caution can one embark and disembark…" This problem would be alleviated later in time after the extension of the breakwater.

Through this simple landing stage, well into the 20th century, kings, nobles, scientific travellers, and emigrants passed, brought or taken by barges that linked with the ships anchored in the bay.

The name Los Platillos seems to have been given because the basalt stone staircases arranged in pairs opposite each other, with two series of steps of 4 and 6 steps each, viewed from the sea looked like the framework of the scales' pans.

At the sides of the landing stage, at the beginning of the 19th century, a fixed iron davit (hand-operated crane) was placed for luggage service. Decades later, already mid-century, a second crane of English origin was brought. With the money from renting both, the first shed for goods storage was built in 1868, replaced in 1913 by the iron Marquesina that still stands today. 

For years this was the meeting point of the cambulloneros, the white cargo workers - so called to distinguish them from the coal workers -, the port watchmen (Guarda Muelles), all those related to port traffic and curious people in general, who came there to see who was leaving or arriving. 

Both the landing stage, the Marquesina, the Farola del Mar and the piece of basalt ashlar wall (with the impacts from the battle against Nelson) adjacent to it, were moved in 2010 to this place from their original location (now in the tunnel for port traffic, under the lake of Plaza de España) due to successive expansions of the port facilities.

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