Electric Station of the Barrio de los Hoteles

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Architecture · Subcategory: Industrial architecture · Year: 1918? · Authors: Antonio Pintor y Ocete

At the end of the second decade of the 20th century, electricity was an established reality in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. With the aim of bringing electrical supply to large areas of the expanding city, the municipal architect Antonio Pintor designed a series of transformer and supply stations in strategic locations within the urban grid. These are simple prism-shaped constructions equipped with a tower from whose apex the wiring for the supply originated. We are faced with functional buildings not lacking a clear aesthetic sense framed within the eclectic style, so widely practised at that time. 

The station built in the Barrio de los Hoteles, at the intersection of Pi y Margall, General Antequera and Veinticinco de Julio streets, supplied electrical power to that entire newly built area of the city and, in some sections, still under construction.

The appearance of this transformer station is somewhat more accomplished than its contemporaries in Salamanca and Parque García Sanabria. Here we observe a prism-shaped base without tile covering with four cast-iron skylights of clearly modernist aspect located at the four corners of this base. The four-sided tower rises without attachments to reach its apex through a lantern that has two openings per side, adorned with small geometric figures. All is crowned by a four-sided roof.

At the time, this functional construction must have fitted very well, from an aesthetic point of view, with the ensemble of buildings in the area, now clearly altered.

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