The Gas Factory

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Memory · Subcategory: Sites of memory · Year: 1907

From 1885 onwards, the town council of Santa Cruz decisively considered the installation of public lighting by means of gas. The English company Burrell, Wolfson and Co., whose representative in Tenerife was Enrique Wolfson, was incorporated as a public limited company under the name "The Tenerife Gas and Coke Company", signing a contract with the corporation at the end of 1886. Some gas street lamps operated in Santa Cruz, but few, as in 1897 the city definitively opted for electricity. Nevertheless, gas did not disappear from Santa Cruz, as in the early 20th century it became the main fuel for producing heat sources both in private homes’ kitchens and in workshops and factories.

On 18 February 1906, Carl Franck, representing the Franke house of Bremen, Germany, requested from the Santa Cruz town council the administrative concession for the public gas service. He committed to manufacturing and supplying gas for heating, cooking and industrial uses, for the benefit of private consumers. In addition to installing underground cast iron pipes throughout the capital’s streets to conduct the gas, the company proposed the construction of a factory located, for safety and hygiene reasons, on the outskirts of the city, in what was then called "Llano de los Molinos", bordering to the east with Calle de Regla or Camino de Lazareto. This is the area where the bus station is located today.

The gas factory was ready for inauguration at the end of 1907. It consisted of several buildings: on one hand there were the ovens and coal bunkers, a space whose floor plan took an L shape, divided into three large rectangular naves, two of which were covered with corrugated zinc sheets and the other with flat tiles over a framework and iron structure; on the other hand, a hall was built to house the apparatus and machines, with a floor plan similar to the previous one, with concrete intermediate floors over a metal framework; and finally, a building was erected for housing and offices, rectangular in plan, with a total area of 152 square metres, of which 56 were built on a single floor covered by a flat roof and the rest on two floors covered with flat tiles.

The factory operated until 1975. From then on it was used by UNELCO (Compañía Eléctrica de Canarias), the company that owned the factory since 1932, as a depot and warehouse. In 1993 it was demolished, losing forever the only example of this type of industrial architecture existing in the Canary Islands.

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