La Granja Park

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Leisure · Subcategory: Green spaces · Year: 1976 · Authors: Luis Iglesias Martí

La Granja Park is located between Benito Pérez Armas street, Bélgica avenue, Madrid avenue and Comodoro Rolín street. With its 64,310 square metres, it is one of the largest urban green areas in the Canary Islands. It is situated on the site where an old botanical installation dependent on the Ministry of Agriculture once stood, functioning as a forestry nursery. The estate it occupied was known as La Granja, hence the name of the current park.

Once ownership of the land was transferred from the Ministry of Agriculture to the City Council, the corporation commissioned, in the mid-1960s, the architect and landscaper Luis Iglesias Martí to draft a project for a public park in this location. After years of waiting for the necessary budget allocations, the work was finally awarded in 1974, and the park was inaugurated in 1976.

The space is configured by a series of concentric rings that structure an open vegetation area, with grass and large species. Trees and palms abound, while shrubs and herbaceous plants are scarce. Inside, a very striking group of Roystonea regia (royal palm) and bamboo cane fields stand out; some exotic species were also planted such as the American walnut, the ombú, various species of ficus, etc. There is a group of Elaeis guineensis (oil palms), brought from the Palmetum of Santa Cruz.

The enclosure has wide asphalt and compacted earth paths, surrounded by landscaped plots. These are raised above the paths and therefore the soil is always retained by rows of large basalt rocks. It is also equipped with a children's playground and several sculptures, among which the one dedicated to Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente, by María Belén Morales, stands out.

La Granja Park offers a very wide range of facilities for outdoor sports practice. At the beginning of 2017, it was also equipped with a professional skatepark considered the best in the Canary Islands.

In the upper right corner of the park is located, as an additional facility of the complex, the Biblioteca Pública del Estado de Santa Cruz de Tenerife (Casa de la Cultura) (State Public Library of Santa Cruz de Tenerife - House of Culture). Just on the opposite side, at the lower left vertex, is the Central Citizen Service Office of the Santa Cruz de Tenerife City Council.

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