The rehabilitation works of the Viera y Clavijo Cultural Park will officially begin next week. After more than 15 years of waiting, and a clear deterioration in the old Colegio de las Asuncionistas, the long-awaited recovery of this Asset of Cultural Interest (BIC) is finally becoming a reality. The deadline to start the works has been brought forward by a couple of weeks over the forecasts of the Santa Cruz City Council, which had estimated that they could start at the beginning of next month. The speed with which the Government of the Canary Islands has carried out the modification of the agreement signed between both administrations, with a new distribution of the delivery terms of the annuities, has allowed the area, which Dámaso Arteaga has directed in this mandate, to sign and the contract with the concessionary company and proceed to the signing of the reconsideration act next week, and, with it, the start of the work.
Just yesterday, the Government of the Canary Islands published in the Official Gazette of the Province (BOP) the new addendum to the agreement with the Santa Cruz City Council, which it had already signed a few weeks ago. Thus, it will receive 1.9 million between now and 2025, which are added to the money already transferred since 2020, and which together add up to 6.1 million. The Consistory must cover the rest of the financing until reaching the 11.8 million budget that this rehabilitation has. The work will be carried out by the construction company Sando, the winner of the tender. The execution period is two years, so it is expected to be finished in 2025. The company will have to capture the project that the Tenerife architect Fernando Menis designed for this new Viera y Clavijo.
The central idea of the project proposed by Menis is respect for both the pre-existing architecture and the surrounding nature -the vegetation, the ravine and the topography-. The old school and the chapel will be rehabilitated and the current park in the form of a green ring will be expanded. A small Ceibas forest will be planted to accompany the existing specimen and urban gardens will be included for educational purposes.
As regards the main building, the drafting team proposes the construction of four new vertical communication nuclei to solve the accessibility problem. In the semi-basement of the south wing, a new space is added, as a warehouse/storage in connection with the new freight elevator. This allows accessibility to all floors of the building. It is intended to solve the pedestrian connections with the environment, so that pedestrian access to the space is favored.
The park that takes its name from the botanist José Viera y Clavijo was built in 1903 with a project by the architect Mariano Estanga and the engineer José Rodrigo Vallabriga. It has been formed as a cultural complex, made up of the Pérez Minik Theatre, whose recovery is not included in this phase, and the Colegio de la Asunción, an old neo-Gothic church founded by Belgian nuns, later transformed into the first school for women in Tenerife, which was in operation until 1978. The only example of a neo-Gothic religious building in the city, the College has had the category of BIC since 1986.
