Starting next Monday, initially for a week, the Centro-Ifara District will repave three streets in the Las Mimosas neighborhood, in the vicinity of the Escuelas Pías school. In addition, a series of bollards will be placed in the area of the educational center as a first step to improve the safety of minors at entry and exit times. On the 21st the work will begin in the streets Manuel Parejo Moreno, Doctor Christine Díaz Martínez and Paseo de las Escuelas Pías. The works will take place over seven days and have a budget of around 30,000 euros, which is fully financed by the Santa Cruz City Council.
In the place that will be the object of works, a meeting of the councilors of the District, Purificación Dávila, and of Mobility, Evelyn Alonso, with representatives of the management of the educational center, took place yesterday. Municipal technicians also participated. The objective was to coordinate the previous tasks and the development of the works in order to avoid disturbances in the environment. It was also planned that some neighbors would attend, but in the end they could not attend the meeting.
It is a historical demand of the school. It consists of improving an environment that supports a large volume of traffic at the entrance and exit times of the 750 students of this private center, which provides Early Childhood, Primary and Secondary Education. The confluence of vehicles and pedestrians on crowded roads causes some problems on a fairly common basis. This measure now aims to solve them.
He mayor of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, José Manuel Bermúdez, assesses that this intervention means “fulfilling a commitment made with the residents of this area of the municipality and with the school.” This work will resolve “the poor condition of the pavement in these three streets.” The councilor of the capital of Tenerife recalls that “we reached that agreement on a recent visit.”
Purificación Dávila emphasizes that the meeting held yesterday morning served to analyze, together with the technicians and representatives of the educational community, “problems related to safety and accessibility at school entry and exit times.” She details Dávila that “it is a demand not only from the center, but from the surrounding residents.” She concludes the councilor: “The goal is that before the start of the school year the work is finished.”
new bollards
In a first phase, some bollards will be placed to ensure the passage of pedestrians on the sidewalks while, in a second, the sidewalks will be widened to make entering and leaving the school safer at peak hours. The asphalting work obliges to suppress the parking spaces in the three mentioned streets and to prohibit circulation between 8:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. from Monday, the 21st, to Friday, the 25th.
The works will be carried out by the company that has been awarded the road maintenance service in the capital, Conacon-Cpoc –Conservación, Asfalto y Construcción SA and Constructora de Proyectos y Obra Civil–, with a budget assumed by the Downtown-Ifara District itself.
A piece of Santa Cruz history
The headquarters of the Escuelas Pías is located around the neighborhood of Los Hotels, near the Rambla de Santa Cruz. It is a unique building built as a watchtower over the capital. It was built at the beginning of the 20th century and inaugurated as Hotel Quisisana, until it became the school in 1940. This always kept the name of Quisisana in the popular heritage. The Piarist Order designed an educational project that concluded with the rental and subsequent acquisition of the hotel, owned at that time by the Cabildo de Tenerife. In 1977, the Quisisana was leased to the CEU San Pablo for ten years. The Pious Schools returned to the city in the last years of the 20th century and to date. It is one of the most unique buildings in the city and, specifically, in the Las Mimosas neighborhood. This includes the nucleus that gives it its name plus those of Finca Salamanca and Pino de Oro, with a dominant typology of residential chalet. It currently has about 3,000 residents and grew during the expansion of the chicharrera bourgeois area in the mid-20th century. The Quisisana hotels, built in 1904 by businessman Enrique Wolfson Ossipoff, and Pino de Oro, owned by Alfred Lewis Jones -disappeared in the 1960s- were nuclei around which people with more resources began to build their palaces, something immortalized by the mythical lyrics of Los Huaracheros: A brunette awaits me sighing in Las Mimosas.| JDM