Vegueta: where Las Palmas began: a self-guided walk
By Alleytale
The first Castilian town in the Atlantic, from the 1478 camp to Columbus and the cathedral
Vegueta grew out of that camp, and each stop adds a layer: the house where Columbus is believed to have called in 1492, the cathedral begun around 1500, the churches rebuilt after the Dutch attack of 1599.
The stops
On 24 June 1478, Juan Rejón's Castilian troops made camp on the bank of the Guiniguada ravine around where this chapel stands, and the settlement that grew from that camp became Las Palmas. A plaque on the wall says Rejón founded the Villa Real de las Tres Palmas here on San Juan's night in 1478. The chapel you see dates from 1757; it replaced one built in 1478, first dedicated to Saint Anne, which was the city's first church.
Photo: Bengt Nyman — CC BY-SA 4.0 Part of this building is said to be the old Governor's House, which Columbus is believed to have visited in 1492, on his first voyage, to ask for help repairing the Pinta. The house dates from the late 16th century, and its courtyard has a Gothic well curb and a Renaissance arcade that came from the Santo Domingo convent, which the Dutch corsair Pieter van der Does destroyed. It opened as a museum in the early 1950s and now covers the Canaries and their links with the Americas.
Photo: Cesar Gonzalez — CC BY-SA 2.0 This sculpture shows Néstor Álamo (1906 to 1994), a composer, journalist and writer from Guía who became one of the great figures of Canarian popular culture. He created and designed some of the spaces of the Casa de Colón, in the heart of the original Real where the city was founded, and was its first director. Earlier, from 1930, he spent almost two decades in the library of El Museo Canario, sorting its documents, above all the papers of the Canarian Inquisition.
Photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/erikkristensen/3753827805/ — CC BY 2.0 Work on the cathedral began in 1500 under the name of Saint Anne, and the first, Gothic phase stopped in 1570; building resumed from 1781 with a new neoclassical front. A plaque on the wall adds that in 1599 the Dutch invaders left the building alone, so its art and archives were saved. Inside, the pillars are worked to look like palm trees, and until 1819 this was the only cathedral in the Canary Islands.
Photo: Gerd Eichmann — CC BY 4.0 This church began as the chapel of the Vera Cruz, which the city council had built in 1524 as thanks for the end of an epidemic. The present church comes from a rebuilding begun in 1786, with its plain neoclassical front started in 1788, and in 1852 it became the mother parish of the city and the island. It keeps the Christ of the Vera Cruz carved by the Grand Canarian sculptor José Luján Pérez, while several of its old grave slabs are now in El Museo Canario.
Photo: sailko — CC BY-SA 3.0 The conquerors chose this square as the centre of one of the first towns in the Canaries, and the cathedral, the Bishop's Palace and the town hall still stand around it. At one end sit eight cast-iron dogs facing the cathedral front, placed here in 1895 and painted green so that they pass for bronze. Nobody knows for certain who made them, and they have become one of the symbols of the city.
Photo: hh oldman — CC BY 3.0 The town hall was inaugurated in 1856 on the Plaza de Santa Ana, where the Bishop's Palace and the cathedral also stand. About ninety paintings hang inside, among them Emigrantes by Ventura Álvarez Sala, which the Prado Museum passed to the city council in 1909 and which presides over the main staircase. After a renovation it reopened to the public on 12 April 2010, once more the mayor's seat.
Photo: sailko — CC BY-SA 3.0 Built in 1615, this chapel is so plain, says the city's own panel on the square, that it looks more like a country church than part of Vegueta's heart. It houses the Cristo del Buen Fin, a life-size crucifix from the last third of the 17th century by an unknown maker, which goes out in a silent procession in the early hours of Good Friday. In the garden of the square, a fountain opened in 1867 stands under a small monumental temple.
Photo: sailko — CC BY-SA 3.0 The Dominican monastery of San Pedro Mártir stood here, said by tradition to date from the time of the Catholic Monarchs, with a cloister and about forty friars, and it was a place where theology was studied. A Dutch fleet under Admiral Pieter van der Does burned it in 1599, and the present church dates from the early 17th century. Its portal and bell gable are carved in blue stone with the Dominican emblems, and inside are works by the Canarian sculptors Luján Pérez and Fernando Estévez del Sacramento.
Photo: sailko — CC BY-SA 3.0 This chapel was first built in 1526 and dedicated to Saint Mark the Evangelist; from 1610 it was linked to the Virgin of the Kings, which gave it its present name. The Dutch attack of 1599 destroyed it entirely, and it was rebuilt by Rodrigo de León, a councillor for life, and his wife Susana del Castillo. Its roof fell in on 28 March 1940, and it was solemnly blessed again in January 1944.
Photo: Ubayrbd — CC BY 3.0 El Museo Canario began in 1880 as a small museum and library on the second floor of the city hall, set up by a group of intellectuals led by Dr Gregorio Chil y Naranjo and Agustín Millares Torres. It opened in Chil's former home in 1930 and still works there, and it holds the largest archaeological collection in the Canary Islands, about the people who lived here before the Castilian conquest. Among its pieces is the Idol of Tara, a terracotta figure whose origin and original use nobody knows.
Photo: User:Alavisan — Public domain
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