Taganana

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Memory · Subcategory: Historic sites · Year: C. 1500

Taganana is a population entity located in the homonymous valley on the northern slope of the Anaga massif, 24 kilometres from the city centre of the capital, to which it belongs administratively. But it was not always so; Taganana, which is one of the oldest population centres on the island, had administrative independence until the 19th century.

Today it is established as one of the most charming places in Tenerife, thanks both to its wonderful natural surroundings and its interesting historical past.

The origin of its population centre lies in the land allotments (datas) made by the conqueror Alonso Fernández de Lugo after completing the conquest of the island. In 1501, property in this valley was granted to a group of people from Fuerteventura and Lanzarote who had already been living in this place for several years. They were settlers established with their wives, children and goods, who had turned some land of difficult orography into cultivable land, building irrigation channels to take advantage of the abundance of water, constructing houses and road layouts. Immediately the place became prosperous mainly due to the cultivation of sugar cane and its refining through the mills. By 1506 one of these mills was already operating in the area known as Portugal, perhaps so called because its builder, Diego Sardina, and most of the workers specialised in sugar production tasks, were of Portuguese origin. 

In 1507 the place already appeared under the name of Santa María de las Nieves, with its own parish and a local mayor. At this time Taganana was one of the most prosperous places on the island due to the sugar trade (highly valued in European markets), and economically much more active than Santa Cruz, which at that time was nothing more than a simple fishing village and the port of La Laguna.

Alongside sugar production, it became necessary to trace efficient and safe routes for transporting the product. Wide roads for carts and beasts were built connecting the hamlet with the coast. From the nearby beaches of Tachero and El Roque, the merchandise was shipped on vessels heading to the main European markets on the peninsula or Flanders. 

During the 17th century, after being unable to compete with sugar produced in America, the area specialised in vine cultivation and the export of wood extracted from the lush nearby forests. In the mid-altitude zones, cereal production was combined with livestock farming, an activity that continued the tradition of the aborigines. 

In the 19th century the Taganana town council requested its annexation, either to La Laguna or Santa Cruz. In Santa Cruz it was considered that the incorporation of that distant village was useful because it already belonged to the same judicial district and, on the other hand, bordered the Aguirre mountain, a circumstance that allowed better care of the springs supplying the capital city. The annexation took place initially in 1850; but not everyone in Taganana agreed and in 1871, taking advantage of the political and administrative confusion in the country at that time, it separated again. Finally, and definitively, the hamlet was administratively united to Santa Cruz in 1878. Such an isolated area needed basic services (cemetery, bridges, water supply, schools, etc.) that only larger administrations could provide.

Taganana's great secular problem was communication with the outside. Its location in a deep valley, with significant slopes, kept the village isolated and in an economic situation characterised by self-sufficiency. Its isolation was a reality for quite some time. Everything changed when the road was completed, in the late 1960s, which, climbing through the San Andrés valley, crosses the mountain through a tunnel, making the definitive connection with Santa Cruz and the rest of the island possible.

Today Taganana has become an interesting centre of tourist interest, where the beauty of its natural surroundings is combined with a rich ethnographic heritage.

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