“I bring the dog for a walk, but because it is a big dog. If not, not crazy ”. María, a resident of the area, believes that, at nightfall, the Santacrucero Viera and Clavijo park it looks like “a horror movie set.” He is not without reason. In several areas garbage accumulates just a few meters from a playground and the silhouette of the building, declared Asset of Cultural Interest (BIC), is presented as a ghostly figure. The presence of squatters, or people who, sporadically, sleep in the area, the neighbors do not like. The opening of the next Rodin Museum appears as an opportunity for a place abused for years.
Raised in 1903, the old College of the Assumptionists, the main building of the complex, was, at first, a neo-Gothic church, being the only architectural sample of this style in all of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Later, a farm would be acquired from the Beautell family to expand the complex. Once the school closed in 1978, its auditorium was taken over by the Pérez Minik theater, which is now completely in ruins. In the whole of the Canary Islands there was no similar place, and it was later dedicated to culture, hosting the Menéndez Pelayo University headquarters, the City Council’s Culture Management, the municipal music school and spaces for the elderly or neighborhood associations. Then the abandonment would come.
From splendor to abandonment
In 2004, an agreement for the transfer of the property was signed by the Santa Cruz City Council to the Government of the Canary Islands. Just one day later, it was closed “tightly”, as revealed by Ana Mendoza, former student of the religious school that was in the place and president of the Association for the Rehabilitation of the Viera y Clavijo Cultural Park, formed in 2011 when, Almost by chance, he managed to see the state of the complex: “Everything was dirty and abandoned. They even made me want to cry ”.
Ana met Manuel (not her fictitious name), a Cuban who arrived attracted by a ceiba tree, a tree considered sacred in many cultures that is another of the jewels of this park: “I came to live and saw that everything was full of rubble. Ana and Carlos, her husband, bought us tools and the City Council gave us a container to be able to leave the remains ”.
Manuel, whom Ana affectionately calls the mayor of Parque Viera y Clavijo, recognizes that, at present, there are 11 people who live in the place. There are no problems with the occupants who are inside the buildings, although there are with some who spend the night and relieve themselves in the garden areas, where garbage accumulates.
In 2013, the association went to court after Inés Rojas, then Minister of Culture, Sports, Social Policies and Housing of the Government of the Canary Islands, expressed her intention to demolish the Pérez Minik theater. “It was nonsense,” says Carlos Castañosa, secretary of the association: “As part of a BIC group, he could not be touched. We went to the Prosecutor’s Office and denounced the attempted demolition of a BIC. The sentence was devastating ”.
Conflicts and fights
When Manuel decided that he would live in Parque Viera y Clavijo, he found a “very bad” environment. Groups of citizens from different countries were assiduously fighting for control of the area, which caused alarm from the neighbors: “The police and firefighters had to come almost every day. For example, they would climb up to the top of the building and burn the mattresses on which they slept there, but we managed to change that. It is true that last year there was a fire caused because there was a lot of garbage accumulated, but it was the last major incident ”.
Now, with the arrival of the Rodin Museum, an occupational solution must be found for all these people who use the park as their home and who, in addition, have been key so that the deterioration is not greater. Ana recognizes it that, even, has come to celebrate Christmas Eve dinners with them, on the walls where one day they housed their school: “If it weren’t for him, who knows what a place with so much history like this would be like.”
