La Tarde

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Memory · Subcategory: Sites of memory · Year: 1927

The newspaper La Tarde   was for much of its existence (1927-1982) a reference not only for information but also culturally and socially in Santa Cruz.

Founded by Víctor Zurita with the collaboration of Matías Real and Francisco Martínez Viera, the first issue of La Tarde as an evening daily was published on Saturday 1 October 1927. A week earlier the provincial division had taken place and with its small eight-page format,   it quickly echoed the "Tinerfeñismo" demanded by the island and especially Santa Cruz, following the recent loss of regional capital status.

The newspaper's first location was in a house on Juan de Padrón street and its mid-afternoon edition allowed the pages of the new daily to be imbued with total freshness, focusing the news interest on the latest developments, offering recent news that the morning press could not cover. Both La Prensa , which was published in the morning (and which later, after the Civil War, became El Día ) and La Tarde, were a spontaneous complement offering news at different times of the day, allowing both to share a very broad readership.

In 1932, five years after its launch, the newspaper changed headquarters, moving to a building on Suárez Guerra street, near Callejón del Combate, simultaneously renewing its technological infrastructure and its news offering.

After the end of the Civil War, La Tarde consolidated as an informative daily with interesting cultural sections and open to citizen events. In 1954, the pages of art and literature that had been so fashionable in the Tenerife press before the war reappeared in this newspaper. Led by the group of intellectuals who in the 1930s founded Gaceta de Arte ; figures such as Domingo Pérez Minik and Pedro García Cabrera promoted the birth of Gaceta Semanal de las Artes  as a supplement to the daily La Tarde . This supplement continued until 1968 as the only cultural supplement published in Tenerife's media, gathering around it artists, writers and intellectuals of various generations. 

In 1969 the publishing company acquired ownership of a beautiful building located on the same Suárez Guerra street, now at the corner with Pérez Galdós, a building that had previously been the "El Águila" tobacco factory. Here the new headquarters were set up, incorporating an old German printing press in good working order. At that time the newspaper reached a circulation of 10,000 copies daily.

In 1974 its director and founder, Víctor Zurita, died. From then on the newspaper did not adapt to the new times and gradually the evening press lost momentum until its total disappearance. La Tarde  published its last issue on 29 March 1982. Thus a landmark of the city's press was extinguished.

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