Santa Cruz de Tenerife, the port that stopped Nelson: a self-guided walk
By Alleytale
Nelson in 1797, the Candelaria square, the theatre and the market
The attack of July 1797 shaped the city's memory: a cannon in the castle's remains, two English flags in the parish church, a fountain square that was part of Nelson's plan, a convent site that became the theatre and a square named for the date, alongside the Candelaria monument, the museum of the Guanche and the market.
The stops
The largest square in Santa Cruz was laid out in 1929 over the Castillo de San Cristóbal, the fort that defended the harbour and was pulled down in 1928. Rebuilding the square in 2006 brought some of its walls to light, and a gallery under the plaza now shows them, together with a bronze cannon called El Tigre, said to be the one that wounded Nelson on 25 July 1797. The outline of the castle is marked on the bottom of the lake.
Photo: Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net). — CC BY-SA 4.0 At the centre of this square stands the Triunfo de la Candelaria, a white marble monument carved by Pasquale Bocciardo in Genoa in 1768 and dedicated to the Virgin of Candelaria, patroness of the Canary Islands. Four marble Guanches at its base watch over the Virgin on top, and Captain Bartolomé Antonio Montañez paid for it. Until the 20th century it was the first religious monument travellers saw on arriving by sea, and the square was long known as the Plaza de la Pila, after the fountain that once stood here.
Photo: Koppchen — CC BY 3.0 This church stands on the first chapel the Spanish conquistadors built after landing here, and with its five naves it is the only church in the Canary Islands that has so many. Beside the high altar it keeps the founding cross that Alonso Fernández de Lugo planted when he came ashore. In the chapel of Santiago, the city's patron saint, a cabinet holds the two English flags the islanders took from Nelson's troops in the attack of 25 July 1797.
Photo: Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net). — CC BY-SA 4.0 The museum occupies the former Civil Hospital, a neoclassical building, and its archaeology section, founded in 1958, is considered the best collection of objects from the Canary Islands before the Castilian conquest. It is best known for its Guanche mummies, the Guanches being the islands' original inhabitants; among the best preserved is the Mummy of San Andrés, named for the village in the Anaga mountains near where it was found. In the early 1990s it took part in Project Cronos, an international research project on mummies.
Photo: Holger Uwe Schmitt — CC BY-SA 4.0 Known to everyone as La Recova, the city's municipal market opened on 4 January 1944 in a neocolonial style with a colonial, neoclassical air, designed by the architect José Enrique Marrero Regalado. It has three large courtyards and a Mudéjar-style tower, and was conceived like a fortress, in the manner made fashionable by California's mission style. The Serrador bridge, built by the architect José Blasco Robles over the Barranco de Santos, links Calle del Castillo with the market.
Photo: Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net). — CC BY-SA 4.0 Designed by Manuel de Oraá in 1849, this is the oldest theatre in the Canary Islands, and since 1923 it has carried the name of the playwright Àngel Guimerà, born in Santa Cruz. It stands on the site of the Dominican convent of Santo Domingo, closed under the confiscation laws and then demolished. In the battle of 1797 the Spanish general Gutiérrez placed part of his force at the Santo Domingo monastery, one of four points he defended.
Photo: Koppchen — CC BY 3.0 You are back in the Plaza de la Candelaria, now at its fountain. In 1706 Captain General Agustín de Robles had water brought from springs on Monte Aguirre, in the Anaga mountains, to the Plaza del Castillo, today's Plaza de la Candelaria, and set up the first public fountain in Santa Cruz. The square was called the Plaza de la Pila for more than a century, and the water was free for the townspeople while ships paid dues. The fountain you see here was returned to the city in the 1980s, though not to its exact original spot. According to Spanish Wikipedia, Nelson's plan in 1797 was to take the Castillo de San Cristóbal and then deploy in this square to put down any popular uprising.
Photo: Koppchen — CC BY 3.0 Matías Rodríguez Carta ordered this house built in 1721 as his family home, and it was finished in 1752. Its stone façade mixes Canarian Baroque with Neoclassical touches, and inside are two courtyards in the traditional Canarian style. In 1947 it became the first building in Santa Cruz to be declared a Bien de Interés Cultural, and the city council has been restoring it as a tourist information office and a future museum of the city's history.
Photo: Koppchen — CC BY 3.0 This church began as a Franciscan convent, and the present building was completed in 1680; with its three naves it is one of the best examples of Baroque architecture in the Canary Islands. It is best known for the Señor de las Tribulaciones, a small image of Christ that was carried through the streets after the cholera epidemic of 1893, when the epidemic is said to have stopped, so the city invokes it as its protector. The municipal fine arts museum sits at the back of the church.
Photo: NaturCult — CC BY 4.0 This square was laid out in 1857 by the architect Manuel de Oraá on the former orchard of the convent of San Pedro de Alcántara, behind what is now the church of San Francisco. It was named for Alfonso XII, then Prince of Asturias, and opened on 29 October 1860, when some of its laurel trees, sent from Cuba, were planted. The central bandstand, from 1929, replaced a fountain.
Photo: Mentxuwiki — CC BY-SA 4.0 The Añaza Lodge, founded in 1895, had this temple built between 1899 and 1902 to a design by the architect Manuel de Cámara, although the façade was not finished until 1923. Its Egyptian-inspired front has two columns with palm-leaf capitals, a pediment with a radiant eye and four sphinxes carved by Guzmán Compañ. The lodge was dissolved in 1936 and its property confiscated; the building was later used as a military pharmacy store and barracks until 1990, the state sold it to the city council in 2001, and it reopened after restoration in October 2025.
Photo: Chuma23m — CC BY-SA 4.0 The square takes its name from 25 July 1797, the day the city repelled Admiral Nelson's attack, though people know it as the Plaza de los Patos. Built between 1913 and 1917, its central fountain is almost identical to the Fuente de las Ranas in Seville's María Luisa park: eight ceramic frogs spray water at a goose riding a submerged tortoise. Twenty benches tiled with ceramics from Triana in Seville carry painted advertisements from the businesses that sponsored the work.
Photo: Diego Delso — CC BY-SA 3.0 Opened in 1926, this is the largest urban park on Tenerife, named for the mayor Santiago García Sanabria, who organised the administration that made it possible; the doctor Diego Guigou had first asked in the press for such a space. Its flower clock, made in Switzerland by Favag, was a gift from the Danish consul in 1958 and is kept in flower all year. Among the busts along its walks is one of Leonor Pérez, born in Santa Cruz and mother of the Cuban José Martí, and thirteen sculptures remain from the street sculpture exhibition of 1973.
Photo: Koppchen — CC BY 3.0
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