Hermitage of Saint James the Apostle of Benijo

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Memory · Subcategory: Sites of memory · Year: 1639

The village of Benijo is settled on a small plateau elevated 100 metres above the level of the Atlantic, in the northwest of the Anaga massif, on the edge of the last stretch of the ravine of the same name that originates in the misty summits rising just above.

Benijo, thanks to the abundance of water that flows through the ravine most days of the year, was already a place inhabited since the times of the Guanches. Later the area was dedicated, after the Conquest, first to the cultivation of sugar cane and then to vineyards. 

In 1630 the alderman of the island of Tenerife Diego Pereira de Castro, owner of those lands dedicated to vine cultivation and wine export, ordered the erection of a hermitage here under the invocation of Saint James the Apostle. By 1639 the small temple was built, since the licentiate Juan Gutiérrez, beneficiary of the parish church of Nuestra Señora de las Nieves of nearby Taganana, gave possession of the hermitage to the chaplain Sebastián Diepa. From that moment the modest religious building, we suppose a single nave with a tiled roof and a semicircular arch doorway, as was usual in this type of construction, became the centre of the spiritual life of the inhabitants of the place. 

Subject, like the whole area, to the economic ups and downs of export crops, during the 18th century the hermitage began its slow decline. In 1713 it presented a lamentable state of conservation and in 1747 it was already in ruins when visited by Bishop Juan Francisco Guillén, who found it “without door and without the necessary ornaments to say mass, since it does not even have a chalice[…] and moreover it needs whitewashing and repairs […] and to put a door .”

Today of the old hermitage of Benijo only some walls remain to which others have been added to form a small country house situated on the edge of the path that descends to the beach.

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