Sitjá Passage

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Architecture · Subcategory: Civil architecture · Year: 1899 · Authors: Antonio Pintor y Ocete

In 1898 the developer Juan Sitjá acquired from the Sociedad Constructora a series of plots located near what was then known as Cuatro Caminos (later La Paz square). The entrepreneur's idea was to carry out one of the largest private construction promotion operations in Santa Cruz: the construction of forty-nine low-cost homes to be built on what were then the outskirts of the city, between the edge of the road to La Laguna, La Rambla, Castro street and what we now know as Juan Pablo II. The architect Pintor was commissioned to carry out the urbanisation of this large block. 

In 1899 the technician presented plans with a model solution. A homogeneous complex was projected, with a central passage, in which two-storey units were configured as autonomous entities endowed with acceptable health conditions for the time. 

The formal treatments of the façades were different according to the importance of the streets they faced; thus, the most luxurious were those facing the road to La Laguna. The constructions of the central passage were designed from a somewhat more modest point of view. The passage, accessed through a small cast-iron arch, was adapted to support the vehicular traffic of the time.  

Over time many of the homes in the original development have disappeared (not a single one remains facing Rambla de Pulido), and others have been transformed into commercial and leisure premises. Nevertheless, Sitjá Passage remains, barely, as a reminder of a type of popular construction of enormous solidity for its time, which efficiently solved the housing shortage in Santa Cruz at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century.

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