La Orotava, Canarian baroque: from the Casa de los Balcones to the Hijuela: a self-guided walk

By Alleytale

Canarian baroque, the balconies and the Victoria garden

La Orotava climbs a steep slope, and the walk takes in its baroque houses and churches, the flower and sand carpets of Corpus Christi, and the convent land that became a town hall and gardens.

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The stops

1. 1Casa de los Balcones

   The Casa de los Balcones takes its name from the carved wooden balcony on its façade, and the town's tourism site says its style shows an unmistakable Portuguese influence. Wikipedia says building began in 1632, with Spanish Wikipedia putting the finish at 1675, and describes a three-storey front with five balconies on the second floor and a long balcony above. Beside it, at number 5, the Ximénez Franchy house holds a museum of the sand and flower carpets that La Orotava is known for.

   

2. 2Iglesia de San Francisco

   This church and the old Santísima Trinidad hospital beside it are one surviving trace of the San Lorenzo convent, so important on the island that it was nicknamed the Escorial of the Canaries. In the story the town's tourism site tells, the conqueror Bartolomé Benítez de Lugo paid for the convent after two brushes with fire in which a Franciscan came to his aid, and a later fire ruined it at the start of the 19th century. Inside is a polychrome Virgin of Charity of the Andalusian school, which came from Seville in the early 17th century; the Church certified a miracle of her lamp's oil in 1632.

   

3. 3Casa Lercaro

   Casa Lercaro is a listed monument at number 7, Calle Colegio, and its balconies of carved wood and the sgraffito frames around its windows give it a baroque air. The town's tourism site says this late 17th-century house was first linked to the Ponte family, descendants of a Genoese banker who invested in the conquest, whose heirs have held the title of Marquises of Quinta Roja, and that it later served as a warehouse and a tobacco drying house, with a tannery at the back in the late 19th century. Spanish Wikipedia adds that the steep site left room for only two small windows on the ground floor, and that millstones lie buried under the courtyard's columns as foundations.

   

4. 4Iglesia de la Concepción

   Spanish Wikipedia calls this national monument the finest example of the baroque in the Canary Islands, and locals nickname it the basilica or cathedral of La Orotava though it is neither. The earlier church was declared ruined in 1758 after the Güímar earthquakes of 1704 and 1705, and the present building was begun in 1768 under Patricio García and inaugurated in 1788. The town's tourism site calls its façade one of the most interesting baroque portals in the Canaries, curved to follow the three naves, with an elegant dome on a tambour above the transept.

   

5. 5Tribute to the Flower Carpet Maker

   This sculpture, put up in 1997, shows a carpet maker placing petals, and the pattern he works on follows the outline of the first flower carpet. The town's tourism site says three women of the Monteverde family, a family of Italian merchants, made that first carpet in the mid-19th century, filling wine-barrel hoops with petals for the Corpus Christi procession, a tradition the family imported from Italy. The square was once called the Plaza del Teatro or the Plaza de las Monjas, and the block with the post office was formerly the convent of San Nicolás.

   

6. 6Iglesia de Santo Domingo

   The Dominicans opened this small church towards the end of the 17th century, and its façade carries their coat of arms, a dog bearing a torch. The town's tourism site calls the variety of Mudejar coffered ceilings inside unique in the Canary Islands, the result of wealthy families building chapels that were later merged. The town treats the church and the former Dominican convent attached to it as one complex. The town's tourism site, which calls that convent San Benito, says it was a seat of learning before the 1836 confiscation, counted the engineer Agustín de Betancourt among its students and has housed the Spanish-American Craft Museum since 1992.

   

7. 7Iglesia de San Agustín

   The Augustinians began this church and the convent beside it in the late 17th century, on the hill where the San Roque chapel had stood. The church's tall perimeter walls and elevated site make it visible from almost anywhere in La Orotava, which the town's tourism site reads as an attempt at religious pomp. The former convent, later a barracks, is now the Casa de la Cultura, and its three-storey stone front ends in a baroque bell tower.

   

8. 8Plaza de la Constitución

   This square began as the Llano de San Roque, beside a chapel of that name, and took its present name in the early 19th century in homage to the Spanish Constitution of 1812. It was not paved until 1902, and the central kiosk, built in the early 20th century for performances by the municipal band, is in the neo-Mudejar style. Locals also know it as the kiosk square.

   

9. 9Liceo de Taoro

   This eclectic little palace was built in 1928 for the Ascanio Monteverde couple, following models the town's tourism site says came from a Belgian cultural magazine of the time. It crowns tiered gardens that answer the uneven ground between it and the Plaza de la Constitución below. Since 1975 it has been the home of the Taoro Lyceum Cultural Society, a 19th-century society that the site credits with an important role in reviving the town's culture and spreading its traditions.

   

10. 10Gardens of the Quinta Roja Marquisate

    These seven stepped terraces, the Gardens of the Marquisate of Quinta Roja, were laid out beside the marquises' summer house and are topped by a small white marble mausoleum. The Church refused to bury the eighth marquis, Diego Ponte del Castillo, in the local cemetery because he was a Freemason, so his mother, Sebastiana del Castillo, asked the French architect Adolphe Coquet to build the mausoleum, finished in 1884. It was never used, because he was buried in the cemetery after all.

    

11. 11Town Hall

    This neoclassical town hall stands on the site of the Clarissan convent of San José, which was demolished in 1868 after the confiscation decree of 1836. The square in front was reformed to a project by Mariano Estanga and inaugurated in April 1912; its checked floor, the town's tourism site says, is a Masonic nod to duality, and its benches carry the coat of arms official since 1905. Since 1919 the square's 900 square metres have been the canvas for the giant carpet of volcanic sands from Las Cañadas del Teide made for Corpus Christi.

    

12. 12Botanical Garden Extension

    This small garden of about 3,400 square metres lies behind the town hall and was designed over the old garden of the Clarissan convent of San José, as a nursery for the botanical garden at Puerto de la Cruz. The town's tourism site praises its winding paths, its rare, large or showy exotic plants and its cast-iron gate, and Spanish Wikipedia names a dragon tree, a Canary strawberry tree, a ginkgo and a dawn redwood among its trees. It was declared a historic garden of cultural interest in 2008.

    

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