The fountain known as the Monument to Franco, at the confluence of the Rambla and Francisco La Roche, has been out of service for almost 20 years. It stopped doing so around 2003, and since then not a single drop of water has circulated around the sculptural ensemble signed by Juan de Ávalos. The Santa Cruz City Council announced that it wanted to reverse this situation and put the fountain into operation, and to do so, the Public Services area, directed by Carlos Tarife, commissioned a project that has already been delivered to the City Council, and in which the needs and the cost of putting it into use. According to Tarife, the fountain rehabilitation project would cost around 800,000 euros, and it includes two possibilities, one in which the element of the angel is maintained, and another in which it disappears. “Whether the angel is there or not is a decision that corresponds to the Government of the Canary Islands, which is obliged to make a Catalogue, listening to the affected municipalities, and in that catalog it will have to tell us which elements must be protected and which They can be withdrawn.”
Tarife insists that “what we ask the Government of the Canary Islands is to abandon the uncertainty with this matter and get the batteries with the catalog, since the chicharreros already deserve to recover one of the most beautiful corners of Santa Cruz in the city ”.
The councilor understands that the current Catalog presented by the Government of the Canary Islands cannot collect only the vestiges of Santa Cruz, and that what should be done is to include all the municipalities and finish the document as soon as possible for its application.
If the fountain starts up again, the works to be carried out range from the replacement of the electrical installation, the hydraulics, with the change of the pumping system, the incorporation of ornamental lighting, or the waterproofing of the pool.
The adaptation of the environment is also included, which according to the infographics that DIARIO DE AVISOS has accessed, would be passable, in its entire perimeter, something that does not happen now.
According to the rehabilitation project for the fountain prepared by the company Ircare Canarias, the successful bidder in charge of drawing up the project, in the option in which the central sculpture does not appear, the shields that are placed on the nine columns of the fountain in in the form of a waterfall, so this proposal would be in line with what is established in the Catalog of vestiges, which is nothing more than the removal of sculpture and shields from the public space in application of the Law of Historical Memory.
Elements to be removed from the monument to Franco
As stated in the study commissioned by the Santa Cruz City Council on compliance with the Historical Memory Law in the capital in 2018, and which has been reproduced practically in its entirety in the Catalog of remains prepared by the Government of the Canary Islands, a Once it has been established that the Ávalos sculpture does not comply with the Historical Memory Law, both state and Canarian, it must be removed from public space.
Specifically, it establishes that the sculptural ensemble that is configured by the base must be removed, consisting of an allegory of the island of Tenerife, which acts as an anchor for the upper pieces and as a symbol of the island’s contribution to the military uprising.
The next element to remove would be the figure of the archangel that symbolizes at the same time the historical circumstance of the flight made by General Franco to start the war in the plane known as Dragon Rapide, and the symbol of the war of religion that receives the aid divine through the angelic figure.
And finally, the allegorical figure of General Franco on the archangel represented as an athletic young man dressed in a tunic that alludes to the national flag and presents a sword in front identified as a cross.
With regard to the rear part of the complex, what is proposed is the removal of the coats of arms at the tops of the nine pillars that are distributed on the rear wall that serves as a frame for the complex and in which the fountain in the form of a waterfall. It is explained that the allegorical shields to the nine judicial districts of the province of Santa Cruz in 1960 represent the recognition of the military uprising and the civil war as a just and legal cause.
The same document establishes that the removal of the elements can be carried out in full, that is, without suffering damage, so that they can be guarded in municipal offices, without any possibility of public display of these elements. The only formula provided by the study that was done for Santa Cruz at the time is that a public park be created with the necessary contextualization about its artistic value and its historical and cultural meaning.
As detailed in the study commissioned by the Santa Cruz City Council, the original project file is found in the Almeyda Intermediate Military Archive, which is collected under the title of Monument that Tenerife dedicates to the Caudillo. The memory prepared by the sculptor Juan de Ávalos is transferred to the document, in which the symbolic aspects foreseen as a result of the commission sent from Santa Cruz are revealed.
Original project
“This monument symbolizes the starting point of the Crusade. In it, in a simple way, we use architectural and sculptural elements with plays of water and light to achieve this goal”, writes the sculptor.
It details that the complex will be made up of “a polygonal-shaped pond with a dimension of 30 meters in diameter, closed at its bottom by a wall formed by nine pilasters 14 meters high from its base, one meter wide at its front and three in depth, each crowned by a shield one meter seventy centimeters high, by seventy centimeters wide to be engraved with the representation of the municipality to which it corresponds”.
And he adds that “the pilasters are joined together by eight 11-meter-high spaces that, in the form of a stepped slope, will have five alleviators, through which water must fall from the different pipes that in each of these spaces and the first alleviator They will be distributed.”
