Taganana celebrated yesterday the 521 years of its birth as a people. He did it with the solemnity that the occasion required, that of a town that is the oldest in Santa Cruz (it was founded in 1501), that was twice independent, and that continues to have among its people that yearning for freedom. Yesterday, the IV Company of the Free Militias of Taganana went back through the narrow streets of the town, to reach the church of Las Nieves. Bishop Bernardo Álvarez was waiting there, who officiated the mass, the councilor of Anaga, Inmaculada Fuentes, and the honorary mayor of the town, Amalia Negrón, who presided over the act of raising the flag.
It could be said that Taganana is for Santa Cruz what the Canarian Archipelago is for Europe: an ultraperipheral region. Taganana is far from Santa Cruz and the rest of the Island, hidden and asleep between mountains. That location and its age have given it its own personality and history, which differentiate it from any other town in Tenerife.
Taganana ‘independent’
Like its neighbor San Andrés, which was also celebrating yesterday, the 275th anniversary of the founding of its parish, it came to have its own town hall just two centuries ago, protected by the Cádiz Constitution of 1812. But in 1850 it asked aggregation to Santa Cruz due to lack of economic resources. Curiously, nine years later, the residents of the hamlet again requested the restitution of their town hall, but they were denied. A century later, in 1868, a revolutionary city council was established that lasted until 1877, the year in which Taganana was definitively annexed to the capital, although it had a municipal mayor until 1967, and its own justice of the peace and civil registry until 1976.
Taganana existed as a populated nucleus since before the Conquest of the Island. Its name is of Guanche origin.
