Grain Silo of the Eastern Dock

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Architecture · Subcategory: Industrial architecture · Year: 1965

This enormous building located at the edge of the road connecting the capital with San Andrés functioned for decades as a silo, a term given to constructions designed to store grain. 

The National Network of Silos and Granaries was an organisation that during Franco's dictatorship was responsible for building and designing this type of construction throughout the Spanish geography, given the government's immense interest at that time in controlling, through a process of state intervention, the fundamental domestic grain market.

As a result of this state policy, the Santa Cruz de Tenerife silo was inaugurated in 1965. It was classified, within the broad catalogue of this type of construction, as "type P": silos located in port areas (in this case, at the entrance to the Eastern Dock of the capital's port) and intended almost exclusively for the import, storage and subsequent distribution of grain. Only two of this type were built in Spain: the one in Santa Cruz; and the one at the port of Málaga, built in 1952. 

The Santa Cruz silo presents an appearance of restrained monumentality where functionality, simplicity and economy prevail. It has two flat-roofed bodies: the longer one longitudinally is the warehouse, without exterior openings; the other, frontal, functioned as a filling tower and is traversed by vertical rows of small glazed openings. At the bottom, separated from the upper part by a concrete visor, several openings are made for the loading and unloading of grain which was transported by trucks either to the interior of the island or to vessels that distributed it to the rest of the archipelago.

On 29 May 1984, a law was published that ended the state grain monopoly through the establishment of free trade for producers and intermediaries. With the abolition of this monopoly, the Santa Cruz silo ceased to store grain and gradually became abandoned, thus beginning its evident deterioration.

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