Fernando Pessoa Fountain

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Art · Subcategory: Sculpture · Year: 2002 · Authors: Pepe Dámaso

In the area known as the Palmera square of the Park is this striking sculptural fountain named after Fernando Pessoa, in tribute to the great Portuguese writer.

The fountain, whose design is the work of the Gran Canarian artist Pepe Dámaso, was inaugurated in December 2002. It consists of several concrete cylinders of different heights covered with trencadís tiles and coated with ceramics of various colours. 

Within the enclosure of this fountain is a bronze sculpture that imitates the leaf of a book on which a poetic fragment by Pessoa is printed, with the following text:

For my distant city I fought and fell.

I would not know what it wanted, but it needed me.

Its walls are free, its language preserves what I spoke and men die, but it does not die, like me.

Fernando Pessoa

This text was engraved by means of perforated letters whose main characteristic is that they can be read with night lighting. 

In the same place that this fountain now occupies, next to the majestic Canarian palm tree over twenty metres tall, there was in the past a watering place with a fountain called "Fuente de los Caballos" (Horse Fountain), in what were then the outskirts of the town.

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