La Cárcel

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Architecture · Subcategory: Military architecture · Year: 1949 · Authors: José Luis Aranguren Bourgon

The opening in the mid-20th century of the prison located on Benito Pérez Armas Avenue was the culmination of a demand the city had always had. Behind were very poorly equipped places (castles, lazaretto, adapted warehouses and areas of disentailment convents) that served as prisons in Santa Cruz until the opening of this penitentiary facility.     

In 1922 the City Council joined forces with the Island Council for the purchase of a large plot located on the outskirts of the city at that time, in what would later be known as Benito Pérez Armas Avenue. The intention was to install a penitentiary centre with adequate conditions there. The definitive push materialised a few years later, at the end of the 1920s decade, when the Canarian José Betancourt Cabrera, then Director General of Prisons, promoted and authorised the construction of this long-desired provincial prison. In 1934 the architect José Luis Aranguren drew up the plans and that same year the works began, concluding at the end of 1949, after years of suspension due to the Civil War.  

The building, now considerably renovated, had a square floor plan with a large central courtyard that articulated the different modules. On the outside, the building displays the three mottos that during Francoism were placed on a sign at the entrance of prisons: “discipline of a barracks”, an aspect we can appreciate in its towers of Herrerian typology; “the seriousness of a bank” explicit in the distribution of spaces and the quality of materials; and, finally, “the charity of a convent”, an aspect present in the neo-Romanesque details of the thick walls and the narrow splayed openings with archivolts. 

The prison on Benito Pérez Armas Avenue was active until the mid-1990s, when the Tenerife II penitentiary centre, located in the municipality of El Rosario, came into operation. Today, the old building nestled in the middle of the urban fabric still belongs to the Ministry of the Interior and is used for various purposes ranging from housing the Mercedes Pinto Social Reintegration Centre to serving as a reception centre for immigrants.

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