Triana, Las Palmas: merchants, clubs and Galdós: a self-guided walk
By Alleytale
The merchant quarter, Galdós and the literary clubs
Triana, named for Seville's quarter, grew into the city's merchant district, and its main street, a merchant's mansion, a theatre and a literary club show the bourgeois and cultural life that took shape here, with the poet Cairasco and the novelist Galdós at the heart of it.
The stops
Until the nineteenth century the built-up city stopped at this park, and the northern defensive wall once stood here. The first pier of Las Palmas was built on this spot in the early 1800s, and the sea reached this place when the hermitage in the park was founded in the sixteenth century. The park itself was laid out in 1876 and still has several kiosks, among them a music kiosk where the municipal band gives occasional concerts.
Photo: Odynny — Public domain Of the park's kiosks, this small pavilion is the most important for its architecture, and it was designed in 1923 by Rafael Massanet. Massanet is also named, with Fernando Navarro, as the architect of the main facade of the Gabinete Literario. The Las Palmas tourism website says the kiosk now works as a cafe with an open-air terrace.
Photo: Jafd88 — CC BY-SA 4.0 This chapel was founded in the sixteenth century and dedicated to Saint Elmo, patron saint of sailors, when the sea still reached this spot. After the Dutch attack of 1599 it was rebuilt in the seventeenth century by a guild of seafarers who had their headquarters here, as a place of worship and a burial ground. It has a Gothic-Renaissance doorway, a coffered ceiling and a Rococo main altarpiece completed in 1776, and today it is the parish church of San Bernardo.
Photo: Cvallsbosch Posición de la cámara = (28°06'29.3"N 15°25'01.3"W) — CC BY-SA 4.0 Triana took its name from the quarter of Seville: many Sevillians were among the conquerors, and Las Palmas, like Seville, was divided by water. This was the neighborhood's main street, and in the early 1900s families who had grown comfortable on farming and trade renovated their homes with Modernista facades. A tram nicknamed La Pepa once linked it with the port, and a stretch of its rails is still set into the paving of what is now a pedestrian street.
Photo: Sloggi — CC BY-SA 4.0 Work began around 1900 on this Modernista mansion for Rodríguez Quegles, a merchant and landowner. The Madrid architect Mariano Belmás designed it and Fernando Navarro carried the project through. It stayed a private home until 1972, when the city bought it, and a later restoration revealed Venetian stucco, frescoes and marbles that had been hidden; it is now a municipal cultural center.
Photo: Beta15 — CC BY-SA 4.0 The Gabinete Literario society was founded on 1 March 1844, moved into the Teatro Cairasco, the city's first theatre, and later bought the building. Its work went beyond leisure: it took part in creating the Philharmonic Orchestra of Las Palmas and the island's first industrial exhibition. The present facade is by Fernando Navarro and Rafael Massanet, and a first-floor room, the Salón Rojo, holds portraits of cultural and political figures, Benito Pérez Galdós among them.
Photo: TeodoroSantana — CC BY-SA 3.0 es The parish was founded in 1821 in the church of the old Franciscan convent, one of the first in the city. The Franciscans settled here soon after the conquest, and the convent's building is dated to 1518 and credited to the Sevillian Pedro Llerena. The Dutch attack of 1599 set the original church on fire, and the convent's orchards are credited with seeds of crops later grown across the New World. Look for the stone doorway, Mannerist in style and already close to the Baroque, the Mudéjar coffered ceiling and the stone bell gable that stands apart from the building.
Photo: hh oldman — CC BY 3.0 The poet Bartolomé Cairasco de Figueroa, born in the city in 1538 and admired by Cervantes and Góngora, had his house on this site in the sixteenth century, and for more than twenty years it hosted a humanist literary circle. The first theatre built here, opened in 1845, took his name, and when it was pulled down the square was laid out. A stone monument with his bust stands at its center.
Photo: Beta15 — CC BY-SA 4.0 Juan Negrín was born in Las Palmas in 1892, the son of a prosperous merchant, and trained as a physician before becoming the last prime minister of the Second Spanish Republic, from 1937 to 1939. He went into exile and died in 1956, and historians have judged him very differently. This sculpture and fountain by Juan Bordes dates from 1993, and the neighborhood counts him among its notable residents.
Photo: Odynny — Public domain Work began in 1867 on a design by Francisco Jareño and dragged on for more than two decades, and the curtain first rose in 1890 on a theatre first called Teatro Nuevo and later Tirso de Molina. It took the name of the island's great novelist after his play Electra was staged here with notable success in 1902. After a fire in 1918 it was rebuilt and reopened on 28 May 1928, with painted decoration by Néstor Martín Fernández de la Torre, brother of the architect Miguel, who finished the works; its Salón Saint-Saëns honors the composer, who arrived in Gran Canaria in 1889 saying he sold wine.
Photo: Koppchen — CC BY 3.0 Benito Pérez Galdós was born and lived in this house until he was 19, in 1862. It is a traditional nineteenth-century home built around two courtyards, with a reconstruction of the room where he was born and of the study and bedroom of his house in Santander. The eroded stone statue that Victorio Macho made in 1930, the first monument to Galdós in his home town, stood by the old quay until 1970; Macho had wished that his Galdós would blend into the landscape until it looked like a rock, and it now stands in the museum's new wing.
Photo: Felix König — CC BY 3.0
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